


A Debt Owed

by Celticas



Series: Debts are Paid in Blood [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, Ronin - Freeform, Seriously all of the violence, Violent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2019-11-16 12:28:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 16
Words: 42,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18094316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Celticas/pseuds/Celticas
Summary: Agent Phil Coulson saved Clint Barton's life without asking anything in return. Now Clint has a chance to repay the favour.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I actually have an idea of where this one is going, which is an improvement over the first part.  
> At this stage you don't have to have read Rain to understand but it would probably give a bit of context.  
> The number of chapters is a very rough guess. Watch for any changes.

Clint shivered on the street corner. Snow piled up to his knees and more falling rapidly from above. Who is their right mind set up a meet in the middle of winter in Helsinki? And the broker was late. After Trick had caught up with him during the summer, Clint had had to drop off the radar. Leaving Hawkeye behind. He had put out feelers for new contacts. Taking Jacques’ old persona of Ronin, the heartless, sword wielding mercenary.

This was meant to be the first face-to-face with this broker. He had already done three other jobs for him, but they had all been organised over the darknet.

The one thing you couldn’t accuse any criminal of was being on time. Clint was about ready to say fuck it. He had gotten to the meet two hours early to scope sight lines and exits and the broker was now a good half hour late. If it wasn’t cold enough to freeze the Yeti’s balls, he would stay as long as needed. As it was if the bastard didn’t turn up in the next ten minutes, Clint was out of here.

At nine minutes and forty-nine seconds, a black Range Rover pulled to a stop beside him.

“Ronin?” The passenger asked after rolling down his window.

“You’re late.” Clint growled, his voice further obscured by the thick black scarf he had wrapped around his head.

“Do you want the job?”

Clint grunted a positive.

“Then quit bitching and get in.” The back door opened.

Leaving it up to him whether or not to get in. Clint scowled, this wasn’t the agreement, they were meant to hand over the information and payment offer and piss off. There shouldn’t have been a need to go anywhere else. But he needed the money. Too many of his old bridges had been burnt between Agent Coulson’s hunt for Hawkeye, and Trick looking for Barney.

A quick check of the street showed no one else around. Snow was still falling thick and fast, decreasing visibility and covering tracks almost as soon as they could be made.

The guy in the passenger seat frowned at him, he was taking too long to decide. Without a word, he climbed into the car which pulled away from the curb even before he could strap himself in. The heat was on high in the vehicle and he instantly started sweating, but he kept his layers on. He didn’t know where they were going, they helped disguise his identity and his weapons.

Luckily for Clint’s excretory system, the car stopped quite quickly. As far as Clint could tell the driver had driven directly from the pick-up point to where ever they were now. If they were trying to obscure their final destination, they hadn’t made even the most perfunctory effort to do so.

The three other people in the car made no move to disembark themselves so Clint stayed where he was. They sat in tension filled silence until someone outside opened Clint’s door. The car had stopped in a bright, empty, underground carpark. There were six people looking at Clint. The person holding the door open was a young woman, she couldn’t have been more than twenty. The man Clint guessed was in charge was sitting at a table with an empty chair across from him. He was dressed in a dark pinstriped suit that fit so well it had to be bespoke but left no room for weapons. Not that that meant he was vulnerable, the other four people were men. Each at least half again as big as Clint was, and all of them bristling with weapons from automatics to a machete.

They had definitely been chosen for brawn over brains, to a man none of their set ups were the most tactically useful and would waste vital seconds if they needed to protect themselves or their boss. With the presence of multiple cement pillars and the lack of intelligent security, Clint felt secure in climbing out of the car. He took a minute to adjust his clothing and the two swords on his back before ambling across the carpark. He sat in the vacant chair without waiting to be invited, flicking his coat out to settle comfortably.

“This is the job.” The broker’s voice was deep and reminded Clint of Terence Stamp. He slid a folder across the otherwise empty table.

Clint twisted the string off and opened the package. A pile of papers slid out, some standard A4 printer paper and others were glossy photos of the target. Clint flicked to the photos first. The long-lens images were of a besuited man approaching middle-age looking down fondly on a toddler reaching for his hand and then the two of them walking together.

The assassin barely stopped himself from flinching. Clint knew that man. He even recognised the fucking suit, for about 5.3 seconds six months ago he had considered cutting it up. He may not be able to name the brand or pattern or even colour, but he remembered details, his life literally depended on it.

He carefully scrutinised each image before carefully placing them back on the table and moving on to the paperwork. The first page was a standard contract for his sort of work, an amount, a to be completed by date, and any further details. In this case, whoever was taking out the hit wanted one of Agent Coulson’s hands sent to SHIELD and his other to his family. More than the brutality involved, whoever this was wanted to send a message. They weren’t afraid to go after the family.

The second sheet of paper was the intel he needed to complete the job; name, addresses, any known movements – which weren’t many.

Clint placed the papers exactly on top of the photos, each movement precise. As he settled his hands in his lap he eased a throwing knife into each palm.

“Anything else?” He managed to keep his voice even.

“Complete this job and you will be the top of our list for everything.”

Clint exploded into action even as he hummed acknowledgment. Between one heart beat and the next a knife had sprouted from the throat of all the hulking bodyguards, Clint’s hands moving faster than the eye could follow. Spinning, he sent a tranq. dart into the woman and another knife into the throat of the passenger from the car who was trying to get a gun pointed at him through the window.

Aside from Clint, only the driver and the broker were still alive and conscious. The driver was a kid, same as the woman who had opened his car door. Hopefully he had enough preservation instinct to stay in the car. The broker hadn’t even risen from his chair. His expression dumbfounded, he had thought he was protected by the gun-wielding men around him.

Clint went over the table, slamming the broker to the floor and held a knife millimetres from the man’s eye.

“Who wants the Agent dead?” Clint growled.

When the other man stubbornly held his tongue, Clint allowed the point of his knife to graze lightly against his eyeball, just enough to irritate and make the other man blink.

“Who wants him dead?”

“Zhang Tong.” The trembling broker finally stuttered out.

Clint drove the blade through the broker’s eye and into his brain. A quick death. A painless death.

As he had been interrogating the dead man, Clint had heard the Range Rover squeal out of the building. Sweeping the paperwork into an inner pocket, he followed it out, disappearing into the velvet black cover of a snow smothered night.

= + =

Senior Agent Phillip J Coulson was frustrated. Some might argue that that was an improvement of six months ago when he had been exhausted. He would vehemently disagree. Before he had been exhausted for one reason, now he was frustrated for multiple. It wasn’t a good trade off.

Almost all of it started after that eighteen-hour period when an injured man appeared on his fire escape and ten disappeared just as quietly. First, his efforts to find Hawkeye had been stemmed, all the leads he had had on the archer had vanished a week before the incident, and he had only been seen twice since. Both occasions so fleeting that Phil only heard about them hours after and too late to pick the hunt back up.

The second cause of his frustration was the disappearing injured man, the fingerprints had been useless and the closest they had come to a hit on the blood was a 25% match from a B&E in Iowa from ten years ago. The local LEOs hadn’t been able to offer anything useful.

Thirdly, a new player, or old depending on which intel you went with, but Phil didn’t agree with that assessment, so a new player had burst on to the scene in spectacular fashion. The mercenary would work for anyone with a buck and was ruthless. So far, he had dropped at least one body on every permanently inhabited continent, Phil didn’t think it would be too long until he hit Antarctica, and had garnered a reputation for getting to his target anywhere. Phil’s orders were to eliminate and with the lack of a moral centre that the assassin had shown so far, he wasn’t going to argue with them.

The last reason for his frustration wasn’t even one of his own missions. Or it hadn’t been, until the interpreter with the team on the ground had managed to mistranslate a vital piece of intel and not only screw the pooch on their own op but start an international incident to boot. Phil had been sent in to smooth the ruffled feathers, get the original op back on track, read: finish it all himself and make sure the team got home with little more than a few cuts and bruises.

All in all, while he was better slept, it had not been a great six months for him.

With all of the extra sleep Phil had been getting, it would surprise no one that he was in the office before dawn. As was usual, his desk was almost invisible under the stacks of paperwork that never seemed to end and his inbox was overflowing. A quick sort cut it down by a third, why R&D thought he needed or wanted to know about their metallurgical analysis of an artefact found in Siberia on a mission that wasn’t his would remain a mystery. A red flagged email stood out, and with a sigh that he only allowed himself because he was alone, he clicked into it. There were four lines that managed to ratcheted up his frustration even further.

Phil,

You are expected home for Christmas.

Sincerely,

Dad

The terseness of the message wasn’t surprising, they hadn’t gotten along in years, and it was their first without Phil’s mother, the fire that had burnt in the middle of their family, drawing them all close for comfort but not afraid to burn them if they stepped wrong.

In years past, Phil had managed to get home every second year if he was lucky. He mum had never given him any grief about it, she may not have known what it was he did exactly but she had never bought that he was an accountant. On the other hand, his father had. He believed that Phil was nothing more than a mid-level partner at a no name accounting firm, and if asked Doctor Jeffrey Coulson would say that was all his son would ever amount to. Jeffrey had had high hopes for his only son, Harvard Medical School, John Hopkins Residency, and then following his foot steps to become the best neuro surgeon on the east coast.

That had all ended in Phil’s last year of high school, over thanksgiving dinner he had announced to the family that he was going into the army, and not even as an officer which might have gotten him some leniency, and that he while he understood that DADT was still very much in effect, he felt the least he could do would be honest with his family if no one else, and that he was gay.

Neither of those revelations had gone down well. Neither of his parents had spoken to him again until the day he left for basic when his mother had slipped a packet of his favourite cookies into his bag and wished him luck. Over the next decade in between increasingly grey and then black missions, he had stitched his relationship with his mother back together with the end result of them being closer than ever, and managed to finish a bachelor and then a master’s in accounting.

Nothing in the last 15 years convinced Phil that going home for the holidays would be worth the hassle of getting the time off. Instead he replied with a ‘sorry overseas for work’ and spoofed a South Korean ip address. He doubted his dad would check but you didn’t get to be a Senior Agent without succumbing to a certain level of paranoia.

With family obligation adroitly avoided, he went back to checking the intel reports that had come in overnight from the Europe office. He knew it was going to be a long day when the next email he opened was the report on a bloodbath in a parking structure on the outskirts of Helsinki.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Warning: A lot of Blood.  
> I have the feeling that warning is going to be fic wide. Not chapter specific.

Within an hour of leaving the bloody carpark Clint Barton was on a small boat that told people it was a fishing vessel but in reality it was a link in Eastern Europe’s largest smuggling operation. The organisation stretched from the Arctic to the Baltic Sea. He didn’t like everything they did but those in the underworld could only be so picky. As it was, he had carefully worked against them a few times to assuage his guilt on associating with them.

With a wool blanket and a metallic thermal blanket over that, he had cocooned himself in the front of the boat, out of the way of the small family that crewed the boat. The trip from Finland to Estonia gave him a chance to think. He had only every came across the name Zhang Tong in whispers around camp fires. Up until an hour ago, he had thought he was a mercenary’s bogey monster.

The clearest information he had every heard about the man was from Neena Thurman, a mercenary he had worked with a few times on bodyguarding gigs. Early in her career she had worked for a Mob Boss in Chicago. It was then she had had her encounter with Zhang.

In the three months she had worked for him during a turf war, one of the three bodyguards were always with him. Except for one night when she had been on duty. He had checked into a hotel and dismissed her for the night, not liking the possibility that he would be taken out and she wouldn’t get paid, she had hung around. From the lobby bar, she had watched as an Asiatic man of indeterminate age, and five heavily armed thugs had entered the building. Her infamous gut told her they where who she had been waiting for.

In a short dress and sky-high heels, she had been able to slip into the elevator with them almost unnoticed except for a quick once over by one of the guards. A flirty smile had him turning his attention back to the closed elevator doors, dismissing her as unimportant. With a sway to her hips she had followed the group out of the elevator, passing the suit where her boss was staying, she had overheard the Mob Boss greeting the new come as Master Zhang Tong. Less then a week later, the turf war had ended, with her employer coming out on top.

Neena might have been prone to providing too much detail as part of her stories, she could generally be relied upon for accurate information. The knife wielder had been working for about three years before Clint had worked with her and that had been two years ago. With a timeframe and location, he had somewhere to start looking for information.

From Tallinn he was able to hop a short flight to Nizhni Novogorod and then stow away onto the east bound Trans Siberian with a pack full of food and a thermal sleeping bag. The eight days it took the train to get to Vladivostok were cold and boring and miserable. The most interesting parts were dodging customs and police at the border stations and having done it before it was easy enough to only provide a momentary distraction from the rattle and roll of the storage carriage he had made his nest in.

Clint quite liked Vladivostok as a city. The mix of people and history with modern and cultures made it easy for him to get lost in the bustle. His poor Russian accent didn’t stand out in the melting pot of languages the way it did among the more uniform accents of Western Russia. The one problem he was going to have was that Ronin had never worked in this part of the world and he couldn’t go through Hawkeye’s contacts without garnering some attention.

It was still early when Clint jumped from the slowing train just outside the station. With the help of the dark winter morning he was able to slip away unnoticed by the police that patrolled the station platforms with Kalashnikovs loaded and on display. The trainyard let in to the city centre, the hallways of tall buildings was still in the kind of quiet you only found in a business district just before it burst into movement and noise as the workday began.

Sliding from one shadow to another, it wasn’t even close to sunrise as he strolled into the warm air of an early morning café a few streets over from the port.

His gold blonde hair and tanned skin stood out against the darker complexions of the locals. He didn’t let it concern him, in other cities it would but Vladivostok was a port city on the edges of the old Russian Empire, they were used to looking the other way. A seat in the corner with a window on one side that looked over the industrial port and a pot of strong coffee and he set to figuring out the patterns of movements.

He took his time finishing the pot of coffee but even then, he was still buzzing with the caffeine running through his veins. Time to walk it off. Paying for his drink, he bundled back up and headed out into the frosty, weak sunlight that did little more than illuminate the city, all its heat lost to the depths of space.

He worked off the buzz walking with pretend purpose through the docks. Stopping on one interesting corner or another with his phone pressed to his ear as he took note of flags and who was loading and who was unloading. A Tunisian freighter whose crew were yelling loudly at each other over a broken crane caught his attention. They had only just started off loading and it would be hours to fix the problem. With the early winter sunset, they were his best chance of sneaking onto a ship. Not just to make sure they were going in the right direction.

His stomach gurgled. A job for after lunch then.

Another café with another table overlooking the port, this one with the freighter visible just off to the left. He had just stuffed an ungentlemanly large portion of stew into his mouth when a woman took the seat across from him. He almost choked on his stew. He hadn’t even pinged her approach and the sudden presence of another person startled the shit out of him.

It wasn’t his proudest moment.

“Natalia.” He coughed out when he finally cleared his throat and mouth. She looked nothing like the last time he had seen her, but there were few people who could sneak up on him completely.

“Why are you here Clinton?” She glowered at him over her ruby red lipstick.

“I’ve always loved the snow.” He smirked.

“You hate snow. You should not be in Russia.” She leant across the table, to an outside observer they looked like a young couple enjoying a late lunch.

“I shouldn’t be anywhere Nat. Trick tried to kill me.” He grit his teeth. It had taken him weeks to heal after that clusterfuck. Throwing some money on the table he tried to leave, throwing his jacket on and speed walking out of the building.

She followed him.

“What do you want?” He asked, resigned to her presence. She had something to say and she would follow until she had said it.

“You killed Angot.” Even with her normally bright red hair dyed a mousy brown, she was stunning. The sidewalk was her runway when she wanted to be seen and at the moment she didn’t care.

“Who?” He asked. He assumed Angot was the Finnish broker, but he didn’t stop to get a formal introduction.

They passed a group of men in business suits all of whom just managed to keep their tongues in their mouths. Once they were out of earshot she spoke again, a frown marring her features. Showing the steel under the silk.

“Don’t play stupid. I was on a job for him.” If she couldn’t get paid from the original source, she would take it out of the person that cost her that money, regardless of any previous connection she had to them.

“He was trying to contract me for Zhang Tong.” He hissed at her.

She knew the name and the mythos attached to it.

Clint wasn’t surprised that he didn’t get a response. Suddenly he was walking alone.

= + =

The Northern European Science Division Team 2 were nervous. They were part of a small outstation of SHIELD in Gothenburg Sweden. Most of the time they were making sure the local scientists didn’t go mad with power and that the heavens weren’t doing anything weirder than normal. The most interaction they had with HQ in New York was a biannual assessment from a team of accountants and HR officers, and the quarterly reports they sent via intranet. Senior Agent Lindgren, the agent in charge of the outstation, didn’t remember the last time anyone aside from the assessment people had visited.

To have that visitor be the legendary Phillip J Coulson, the rising star of the agency, the man rumoured to replace Assistant Director Fury when the Assistant Director became Director, just compounded those nerves.

The unassuming besuited man wouldn’t have garnered much attention from the staff if Agent Lindgren’s assistant hadn’t told Doctor Stevens who was coming in to deal with the Helsinki mess. It would even have stopped there if Doctor Stevens hadn’t then told Lab Tech Jepsen in full hearing of the rest of the rest of the Science staff. From there, there was no saving it.

Phil expected to walk into a quiet base, get to Helsinki with a small team, and get out before anyone put it together who he was. The internal gossip that had been swirling around him for the last twelve months was both a blessing and a curse. It kept most of the baby agents away from him, but it also caused whispers and fear to follow him around like a particularly attentive shadow.

Instead, the side eyes and whispers were in full force as he stepped off the QuinJet. They continued during his short time in Sweden and the Science Team was so nervous on the short hop to Finland that they hardly breathed between take-off and landing. The only sound once they got on the road was the Science Team second giving navigational directions to the first.

Phil intensely disliked working with teams that scared of him.

It was the middle of the day when they SHIELD team arrived at the crime scene. That didn’t keep them from freezing in the carpark. Their breath condensing and hanging in the air like spectres standing guard over the dead.

The one good to come of the frigid conditions was that the locals had agreed to keep the bodies in situ, they had grumbled in several languages but capitulated in the end.

As Science Team 2 carefully swarmed across the site like conscientious locusts, Coulson paced the perimeter. Building a mental map and possible series of actions. Mentally rebuilding the scene. Whoever had killed these people was skilled and _fast_. There was a skill level shown here that spoke of long experience and excellent training, but it was unlike any style he had seen before.

Most Militaries, and Paramilitaries had preferred target points, NATO went for centre mass, most of the Middle East for Head Shots, Asia was much more dependent on country. Every hit here, except the last, had taken the victim through the carotid. It was brutal, and bloody, and the most efficient kill spot to take someone out quickly. Even if your body didn’t instantly go into shock from massive immediate blood loss your instinctive reaction would be to try and clamp a hand around the wound, dropping any weapon you were holding.

The blood pools weren’t so much pools, instead the boring grey concrete had been painted liberally with bloody red. A Jason Pollock of blood splatter. It was gory but the layering helped determine who had been taken down in what order.

“Agent Coulson, sir?” One of the techs came up beside him.

He had stopped walking and had been watching the crew work from just beyond the edges of the scene. “Doctor Jepsen.” He greeted the man without taking his eyes off Doctor Schleger who was prying something out of one of the blood spatters.

“The vehicle which was here was a Black Range Rover. It left after most if not all were dead. We have it on CCTV at 01:13 am today.” Jepsen’s English had a light layer of a Dutch accent over the words, not enough to make it hard to understand him, but enough to tell Phil a lot about the other man’s background.

“Do we know who it belongs to?”

“Angot Järvinen, an underground Broker. He organises anything from marriages, to deaths and he does not care who is involved. Completely A-moral and no interest in anything other than money. Also one of our bodies.” Jepsen pointed at the aberrant kill, a knife still embedded in the man’s eye.

A message for anyone who found it. The problem was that it wasn’t a message Phil could read.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint sits around for days.  
> Phil also sits around for days.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was going to be a bit longer, but I ended up liking this stopping point for each of the characters.

By the time Clint was able to ghost out of the container he had stashed himself in and finally touch US soil, his skin was getting itchy with the passage of time. Every second that Zhang Tong was still breathing, was another second he could be contracting someone else to kill Agent Coulson.

Realistically, Clint knew that a contract had probably already been offered and accepted by someone else. Clint gave Agent Coulson an even 50/50 change of still being alive.

The sort of people in Clint’s league were not easy to dodge, and the information packet that had been offered, had everything they would need to get the job done. And done quickly. Hopefully, the little parcel Clint had gotten off before stowing away, had given the SHIELD Agent the head start he would need to stay alive while Clint did what he had to do.

It was broad day light when Clint swung off the mooring rope and onto the dock. The, everything, in him would have preferred to wait until dark, but the clock ticking down in the back of his mind was getting louder each second. Knowing that his luck probably wouldn’t hold for a second broken crane that would delay off-loading, he had to take the first chance that presented itself when he saw it.

The lunch time almost desertion of the area was it. Matte brown clothes and some grime had him almost indistinguishable from the wood, and concrete and rope that made up the industrial landscape of the shipyard.

Overall, it was almost hitch free. An ill-timed walk by of a couple of South African deckhands from the neighbouring freighter had him desperately clutching at the slimy fibres of the mooring line he was swinging from as they decided directly above him was a perfect place to stop and discuss the previous night’s Rugby match between the Springboks and the All Blacks. Hearing them over the pounding of his heart in his throat was a struggle as he waited for them to _leave god damn it!_

Eventually the lure of lunch and a hot cup of over brewed coffee had them moving again. Only when he couldn’t hear them enthusiastic argument about the final quarter try that he now knew way more about then he needed to, did he move again. Getting from the lip of concrete that he had to clamber over, to the shelter of the stacked containers took only a few seconds but had his adrenalin spiking again.

Without his Hawkeye id’s or contacts getting a flight from Seattle to Chicago was going to be pretty much impossible unless he wanted every alphabet agency and a good number of bounty hunters on his ass, which he deservedly did not. Stealing a car was his best bet at transport without having to hop on another form of transport that he had no control over, like a cargo train.

He had a car of his own stashed in Portland. Steal a car, drive a few hours, ditch the stole car, get to his own car, and drive two days to Chicago. Easy.

There was a veritable cornucopia of options in the staff parking, a good part of him felt bad for taking a working family’s car so he looked for the best looking one he could. He finally broke into a silver sedan that was clean and new compared to the others, someone with a nice car was more likely to have insurance and not be living pay check to pay check, right?

= + =

Not so easy.

It was a boring three days of travel. Not a fucking thing happened. In an effort to stay awake along the thousands of miles of interchangeable highway, Clint began mainlining coffee. By the time he was crossing from Montana to South Dakota, his circulatory system was more caffeine then blood. In Minnesota he gave in. He was cross-eyed and was having trouble telling the difference between the colours dancing in the corner of his vision and the street signs.

He needed sleep.

Preferably in an actual bed after weeks of metal floors in transports that he was illegally riding. In the tiny town of Luverne, Minnesota he pulled into the first motel/no-tell he saw. It was the stereotypical roadside motel that catered to long-haul truckers who didn’t care where they slept as long as it wasn’t moving and allowed them to be horizontal, and locals who were more concerned with who they were sleeping with then what they were sleeping on.

The high school student manning the counter was more interested in her phone then in him, which is how he generally preferred his interactions with other people. After a short exchange of mumbles and a couple of finger points, he had parted with more cash then the place really deserved to get out of him but walked away with a key to the room at the very end of the row.

A washed-out red door lead into a washed-out tan and rose-pink room. Clean enough not to smell of mildew but not enough to want to pull out a white glove.  Clint dumped his backpack beside one of the two double beds and spent a careful ten minutes checking sight lines and exits and setting up some traps to slow anyone trying to sneak up on him. He was a sure as he could be that no one knew he had left Europe, let alone gotten back to the States but he had only survived this long by making sure.

After all, there had been at least three other times that he would have sworn on anything you asked him to that no one knew where he was, and he had still been jumped in his sleep. Better to take a bit of time to check and survive the night, then to not and be dead.

With the small room as safe as he could make it, he dragged a clean, for values of clean, set of clothes out of his bag and shuffled his way to the bathroom. With a locked door and more than one stick of explosive between himself and the rest of the world, his body was shutting down. He had been running on little to no proper sleep for far too long and he was going to crash hard.

It took everything he had left to soap himself up, wash, and dress. In a fugue state he stumbled back into the bedroom, dragged the covers off one of the beds and curled up on the other, two sets of covers and blankets and pillows gathered around himself in a warm dark nest smelling of sun-dried cotton and home brand detergent. Smells of his childhood.

= + =

Phil settled into the uncomfortable office chair with a weary sigh. He missed his ergonomic office chair. He missed day light that didn’t end at three in the afternoon. He missed his coffee maker. He missed Melinda, and Maria. He even missed Jasper and if that didn’t tell him how over this whole operation he was, nothing would.

He had been in Scandinavia for a week. After two days in Finland supervising the Northern European Science Division Team 2, who apparently called themselves Kvasir, he hadn’t asked, as they crept from one side of the crime scene to the other with every gadget they could get their hands on. With more data than the library of congress they had finally packed up and returned to Gothenberg.

Where it was just as cold and dark as Helsinki.

They had landed late, but the whole team had trooped back through the small office together. Chattering about tests, and compounds, and analytics that needed to be set up Right Now. Phil knew there was no chance they would follow an order to leave the office even though it was closer to dawn then dusk. If they had been a field team, two days away would be nothing, as a science team leaving the environmental controls of their labs was foreign but the draw of discovery and Science! would be too much for them to resist. So he let them go.

Splitting away from the team as they wound through the small station, he ambled his way to the small temporary office they had assigned him, his mind full of blood spatter and sequence of events. Considering the crime scene got him all the way to his office and through the process of turning on lights and computers and adjusting his seat.

And he was still there in that seat a week later.

They had made some progress, DNA had identified all of the dead, but they hadn’t found a single trace of evidence from whoever had killed them. CCTV footage of a black, or dark blue, or dark grey, or dark green SUV arriving and then leaving the carpark had been found and followed through the city. It had stopped on a non-descript street corner in a different part of the city and picked up a man swathed in dark clothing.  The techs had tried to back trace him, but he only appeared on footage a street over from the pick-up point and they hadn’t found him on any other footage. He had been waiting calmly on that street for almost an hour, the only sign of impatience was a steady increase of him checking the time.

Watching the footage on the initial contact for the he couldn’t even remember what number time, Phil was certain that the waiting man wasn’t happy when the car arrived, his posture tight and weary. But in the end, he still got in the car.

Every long year of experience Phil had was telling him that the meet started peacefully and then something went catastrophically wrong. Annoyingly he just didn’t know what it was.

Aside from their own research, they had also used their backdoors into various local, national, and international law enforcement databases to search for similar MOs. They had gotten a lot of hits. Blades were popular and they didn’t know enough about the particular knives used to narrow it down any.

One entry off Interpol had caught Phil interest for no reason that he would be able to explain to anyone else. Ronin, an assassin that had been working on an off for more than fifteen years mainly in North America and Europe but at least one hit in Asia and Africa each. The movement of the figure on the CCTV should have told him that this guy was too old to be Ronin, but there was something. Maybe the ruthlessness shown in the parking garage. Or maybe the efficiency. Or the skill. That level of proficiency didn’t come about over-night.

Phil was just entering Ronin’s details into SHIELD’s databases, without the moniker, when someone nocked quietly on his almost closed door.

He submitted the entry before acknowledging the sound. “Come in.”

Agent Mikelson peaked around the door. Elsa Mikelson was the shyest person working for SHIELD that Phil had ever met. In the week he had been on-station, she hadn’t strung more than two words together in his presence and was more likely to be hiding in the shadows then standing in the centre of the room. Even so she was the single best administrative officer he had come across.

“Agent Coulson sir. The mail is in.” She squeaked, darting into the office and back out again, leaving a small pile of envelopes on the corner of his desk.


	4. Chapter 4

Chicago was  exactly as Clint remembered.  Windy and cold.  He had to  drive through Downtown to get to  Streeterville , the neighbourhood  Francesco ‘Frankie’  Puglisi and his men worked. Crisp white snow was a muffling blanket over everything. Early winter snow storms had driven everyone but the very brave or very stupid inside.  Clint was 86% certain that him still being on the road put him firmly in the second group, but the clock in his head was getting louder.

Like the rest of the city, the roads of  Streeterville  were slick with black ice.  Keeping control of the old car that hadn’t been serviced in longer than he could remember, wasn’t easy.  He took the straights at a crawl and the corners at a snail ’s pace.  The only saving grace was that  he had the roads virtually to himself.

Clint had never worked for Frankie Puglisi or anyone in his crew and didn’t know where their offices were.  But any black-market worker worth their salt knew where the major players kept their fronts.  The Puglisi family ran girls  in a number of the higher end hotels and bars in Downtown and  Streeterville  and like any good  crime family, they held a deep distrust of their employees and kept someone on site to keep tabs at all times. Make sure the girls were working  and weren’t keeping more than their fair share.

With the storm only growing stronger it was easy enough to buy a hotel room for cash  and shuffle his way into the hotel bar, just another tired businessman annoyed by the weather delay.  The bar was almost empty.  Two  rumpled suits sat hunched over half empty  beers in a booth closer to the back than the front. A  single woman sat at the bar chatting with the bartender about the weather and  Blackhawks season, she had a  three quarters full glass in front of her, but it didn’t look like she had touched it for a while. A final man sat at the far end of the bar. He was trying to look unobtrusive, but the unrelenting black drew the eye.  To the casual observer, he was playing around on his phone, but to Clint his attention was on the woman. 

Clint flicked a single finger into the air as he slid into a seat halfway between the door and where the woman was sitting.  A nod from the bartender and then a beer appearing under his nose finished the non-verbal interaction. 

For fifteen minutes the  six of them maintained their positions. The low murmur of voices rising and falling in conversation.  Clint kept his eyes on his own drink but listened. He was too far away and everyone was talking to softly for him to eavesdrop but he caught the moment the  bartender moved away and the woman slid from her stool. He counted her steps as he stilettos slicked on the highly polished wood floor.

“You’re not going to come and say hello?”  She  purred,  le aning  against the bar . C lose enough that he could feel the  heat coming off her.

Looking up at her words, he got his first proper look at her.  Hair bleached one to many times, hung dry and brittle in unnatural curls around a face too young to be in a bar let alone working it.

“Just here for a drink.”  To emphasis his point he picked up his glass and took a long pull from it. 

She hopped onto the seat beside him anyway. Pouting prettily ,  she lent in, giving Clint a good look down her top if he was interested in looking.  He sent a final smile in her direction before appearing to turn his full attention back to his drink.  As long as no one else came in in the next half hour, the girl and her keeper should leave, unsuccessful, and he could follow the guard back to  some sort of base to report.

With the weather keeping locals away and most business people having retreated to their rooms in anticipation of working  the next day, the girl gave up on finding a John of the night and clicked her way out of the bar.  Seconds after she left to collect her coat, the brooding human shadow at the other end of the bar stood up to follow her. 

Clint timed his exit from his stool to coincide with the man passing behind him. Stumbling as he was much more drunk or much more tired than he actually was, he backed into the man. As he twisted to slur and apology at him, Clint slipped a tracker into the man’s jacket pocket.

Patting the glowering shadow on the shoulder with more force than necessary, he let the man escape.  With the fierce  weather outside, there would be no way to physically  tail anyone without being noticed.  Trying it on someone who  was expecting trouble was just asking for a bullet in the head.

It wasn’t like in the movies,  or at least he couldn’t afford and didn’t need that level of tech.  He wouldn’t be able to sit in a nice toasty  warm hotel room and follow a dot on a screen. He had to be within  200  yards of the little chip for it to ping.

Back out into the driving snow he went.

Clint shrugged so many layers on he ended up feeling like he was the Michelin man. By the time he was buttoned up, the girl was climbing into a car older and more beat up than Clint's, while the thug was disappearing into the back of a shiny black town car. 

In the hour or so he had been inside, more than an inch of snow had settled on his car.  Even with multiple layers of clothing, Clint was still shivering as he pulled away from the curb. The beater left in one direction and the town car in another. Both leaving deep tracks in the soft powder that they were quickly being erased by the storm. 

Clint slowly counted to thirty and then pulled onto the road, the tracks already half gone.  He wasn’t worried yet. He had watched the tail lights inch their way down the street and crawl through a right turn.  Copying the turn, he could see the red glow a block ahead, already indicating their next turn. The two cars made slow progress. Clint having to balance the line of being close enough for the tracker to work but not so close that they noticed him. With the help of his preternatural eyesight, he had the advantage of running dark. If there had been even one other vehicle on the road, he wouldn’t have been able to risk it.  Having a crash and freezing to death in the snow  because he was tailing someone ,  was not how he wanted to spend his Wednesday night.

Grumbling as he  faught  the steering on a patch of ice, Clint passed the street the town car had turned onto, the tracker still flashing away happily. He took the next right and cautiously sped up, needing to close the distance a little bit, especially now that he had lost line of s ight  on the other car.

He had just reached the next corner when the tracker flickered the tiniest bit. Clint frowned at it. The dot had slowed further, their forward momentum slowing almost to a stop. The flickering got worse.

Underground.

The layers of steel and concrete were interfering with the already weak signal. Two blocks? They were working dangerously close to home. Clint took the next right, heading the right direction again but stopped half way up the block. On foot from here. Shuffling up the sidewalk, oozing homeless and hostile in case anyone was watching, He began muttering nonsense to  himself. The  moderately tall high rises in either side of him opened up to show a mammoth of glass and steel. The trackers signal was back as strong as ever. The thug was somewhere in that building.

= + =

Phil accepted the small pile of envelopes, a SHIELD pouch that he knew would contain his personal mail, and a single larger document folder from Agent Mikelson. He didn’t start looking through the contents until the other agent had left and closed the door behind herself. In the dim light of his borrowed office he started with the envelopes. They contained an assortment of memos and reports from HQ that were so classified they weren’t even written on a computer.

The handwritten documents were read and then sorted into the files in his briefcase. There were several things he would have to deal with sooner rather than later but they could at least wait until he had finished opening the rest of the mail. Better to get one job finished before getting absorbed into something else and not getting back to it for days, more than one electricity payment had been missed that way.

As suspected his personal mail contained a 2 nd  notice for his electricity and his phone. Half the time Phil was of the firm opinion that keeping a private apartment instead of a bunk at SHIELD was more hassle than it was worth. But sometimes having an escape was the only thing that kept him sane, and he knew his father would hear if he wasn’t living in a ‘good’ area and he would never hear the end of it. Most people would call that paranoid, his father wasn’t omniscient and didn’t have the security clearance to know how Phil took his coffee let alone his address, but Phil knew that one bad interaction with Blake would have the other man just happening to mention that Phil was disgracing the family name to his mother and before sunrise of the next day, James  Collidge  would know that his son was disgracing the family again.

He paid the bills before shredding them. The last piece of personal mail was an invite to his niece’s confirmation. He pencilled the date in, not intending on juggling anything to attend but willing to go if he was State-side and not in the middle of anything world ending. He tucked the invite into the briefcase along with the SHIELD files.

Every piece of paper was promptly forgotten about when he opened the document folder and spread its contents across his desk. A couple of  standard , white printer paper pages covered in non-descript Times New Roman  11 point  font was accompanied by a stack of glossy high-res photos of him.

Each photo was of him somewhere else in New York and London, the most recent places he had spent more than a few hours before Sweden. There was one of Phil on a rare free Sunday reading the paper at his favourite coffee shop, another of him on the subway leaving work judging by his state of dress, two were Phil with Jasper Sitwell on site at an incident in the UK. It went on. Ten in all. Beneath the printer paper and photos was a single handwritten note on rumpled, dirty paper ‘the debt will be paid’.

Phil scowled down at the singularly unhelpful note. What debt? Paid how? Was sending him the information paying the debt? Was killing him paying a debt to someone else? The note raised more questions than it answered. The more he stared at the short message, the more he was certain it didn’t actually answer  _ any _  questions and opened up a whole book of them.

The printed pages were a little more informative. This wasn’t an internal document, whoever wrote this up was putting together a dossier for a hired hit. They were fell funded and motivated. It hadn’t been a short project to put this information together.

Whoever was behind this could afford the best.

In seconds of opening the package, Senior Agent Phil Coulson was on the phone. There was little he could do sitting in a tiny outstation in Scandinavia. The killer from Helsinki hadn’t appeared again, the science team could forward their reports, and he could monitor Interpol for Ronin from anywhere.

In half an hour he had ordered the  Quinjet  prepped, packed up the office and bunk he had been lent, and scheduled a meeting with the Director for just after he was scheduled to touch down in New York.

The information presented him with an interesting opportunity, this job was right up Hawkeye’s alley. If he played his cards right, he might just find out who was gunning for him this time, and maybe get a fresh lead on the oddly inactive archer.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint races against time and luck. One of them might just have run out.

With an idea of where the Puglisi Family had based themselves, Clint returned to the hotel.  It was going on one in the morning and he had to re-group. He figured he had three options; approach in the morning and pose as someone wanting to buy their services, approach in the morning and pose as someone looking for a job, or break in and steal some shit. 

In the steadily increasing snowfall, he inched his car away from the megalithic high-rise and back towards the hotel. A scalding hot shower and a clean, soft bed waited at the other end. The first of either in too long.

The few hundred feet from one block to the next felt like it took hours. The white that was blanketing caused everything to look the same and the inching speed suspended time. Minutes or hours could have passed between pulling away from the curb and parking down the street from the hotel. By the time he had parked the car and shuffled his way  through  of the driving snow he had made up his mind.  He was going to steal some shit.

The flurry of snow and ice  that followed him into  the gleaming marble f oyer as he pushed through the door  earnt him a sharp-eyed glare from the receptionist  that only intensified as he  stamping his boots and sh ook  off his coat . It followed him across the empty space and into the elevator.

By sheer dumb luck, his hotel room was facing the right direction and was high enough that if it wasn’t for the storm ,  he would be staring straight at the seat of the Puglisi Family.  The storm was bad enough to make an above ground infiltration a very bad idea, which probably wouldn’t have stopped him, except there were no buildings tall enough close by. So that was out. A ground-level entry also wasn’t a good idea, it was a public building but would still be guarded. The expensive real estate and people who could afford it would have insisted on it.

That left below ground. The hotel had kindly left a map of the city’s subway lines as part of their welcome packet. The closest stop was three block south-west of the tower and the line was heading away from it, the likelihood that it ran under where he needed it was low. But Chicago was an old city, over 150 years of construction next to a major water system. They would have layer upon layer of old flood management tunnels, and sewers, and every other type of maintenance shaft this close to downtown. 

His gut told him he didn’t have time to scope this out. He needed to get in there. Now. Changing out of the rumpled, off the rack suit in favour of his custom made, Kevlar and a specially woven elastic that moulded tight to his body without adding bulk or restricting his movement. Under that he wore a silk shirt that served the dual purpose of regulating his body heat and stopping the body armour from chaffing.

Properly outfitted, he slipped into the hallway outside his door and into the stairwell. It was a long walk down from his 14 th  floor room to the sub-basement three, the lowest the building had. He ghosted silently down the stairs and into the dark corridor. The tunnel ran directly north-south. He headed south. Looking for a tunnel on the right, he counted his steps as w ater and steam pipes gurgled and hissed softly beside him . He felt like the only person in the world. The deep snow and raging storm dampening the normal sounds of a large city that even this far underground he should be able to hear or feel in his chest as a deep rumble.

Even on foot and having to wind his way through tunnels that were only going in the vaguest definition of the direction he wanted, it was faster getting back to the tower than trying to fight the storm above. Only an hour and a half after pulling away from the front of the building, he was crouched several floors below it delicately turning lock-picks in a door that would give him access to the amenities shaft that should run from the bottom of the building to the top, carrying everything from internet and electricity to air and sewerage. It wasn’t always the nicest place to be crawling around but it was the most deserted.

He  crab  crawled and monkey jumped his way up floor after floor. The residential levels started at 34 and he needed to be above their bottom level to even have a hope of hooking into any of the private networks. If he was lucky the information he needed would be on the network. If he was beyond  lucky  he would be able to crack whatever encryption the Puglisi’s were using.

It took forty-five exertion filled minutes for him to reach the locked gate that would let him move from floor 33 to floor 34. Wedging himself between a hot water pipe that was threatening to send him to sleep and a thick rope of cables it only took a paltry few seconds to pop the lock open. Whoever designed the security should be ashamed of themselves.

The grating provided a good place to rest and try for the networks though, his legs dangling into the abys he had just crawled his way out of. It was a few minutes of fumbling in the almost dark with tech and tools to attach a cable splitter onto the right wire. A few key words into a search algorithm that a friendly hacker had developed for him a few years ago and he was off.

The protected Mob network was the fifteenth of the connections he tested. A mirror of their server appeared on his screen. Time for him to take over from the software. He knew the timeframe he was looking at but had few other details to work with. Trying to copy everything and figure it out later wouldn’t work either, there was too much information for him to copy time-wise or storage-wise.

Half an hour later he had mark one eye-balled every file in or around the time Neena had worked for Frankie and there was nothing. Any files that existed were hardcopy only. Packing up the tech was quicker than getting it out. Each tool and fiddly pit of metal had a pocket they slipped into and were clipped down with buttons or  velcro . Having already found the network he knew it was another ten floors above where he was sitting and he was running out of time to get in and out tonight. 

His arms were shaking with the effort by the time he was pulling himself onto the ledge outside the small hatch that let onto the floor he needed. In summer the sun would have been rising even as he picked the lock. The time of year and continuing storm outside gave him a little more  lee way  then he would have had otherwise.

Clint was just waiting for the moment his luck ran out.  

Easing the hatch open, he tumbled into the thickly carpeted and softly lit hallway. He had misjudged the torque needed to get the little wooden door open and hadn’t been able to catch himself in time. Even as his back touched the opulent flooring, he was moving. Rolling with the accidental movement onto his knees, silenced pistol in hand and pivoting 360 degrees to check he was alone.

He was.

It wasn’t a hallway that he had stumbled into as he had first thought. It was a wide landing. Gleaming chrome elevator doors at one end, and a heavy wooden, oak maybe, door at the other. Clint was not surprised that the Puglisi’s had a whole floor to themselves, but it did present a little problem. The only way into the apartment was through that door. A door he couldn’t see through because he wasn’t fucking psychic.

Even as he inserted his first lock-pick he was calling himself stupid in every language he knew, which wasn’t an insignificant number. There was a good chance he wasn’t going to survive to see another sunrise, and all to pay back a guy who didn’t even know his name. A guy who had a whole international spy agency to fall back on. If Clint wasn’t the sort of stupid that he was, he would have made sure that Agent Coulson got the information on the hit being taken out on him and called it quits. He wouldn’t be breaking into the home of a mob boss to get a lead on the assassin’s boogieman. 

The lock clicked open under the pressure of the third pick. The door swinging open silently under the lightest push. There was no movement inside. He could hear the raging storm but nothing else. Keeping low he swept into the room, pistol held steady in front of him. The door opened into a wide foyer, marble and silk were his main impression of the room.  There were three doors out of the foyer, two closed and one open. He could see a large lounge room through the open double doors across from him. The two closed doors were identical. He didn’t have time to waste but had no idea which directions he needed to go. He already hated pick a door games, and he could feel that hatred growing with every second he equivocated.

Open door it was. Less noise if he didn’t have to open a door he figured. The soft leather soles of his shoes didn’t make a sound on the highly polished floors. Now, he just had to not slip. The sparsely furnished lounge room was still and dark. None of the furniture could hold the great mass of papers that would be needed to run the empire that Frankie managed. Floor to ceiling windows ran the length of the room, lighting everything in an earie blue-yellow. A door in the same wall that he had entered through stood open. Clockwise through the apartment it was. 

The second door led to a long, curved hallway. All of the doors were closed. Fuck.  The first couple of doors had been kitchens and bathrooms and storage.  He was halfway down the hallway before he hit pay dirt. An office. The worn wood and scratched metal told Clint it wasn’t the office of anyone at the top of the organisation, but the piles of paper and decent computer set up also said whoever worked here actually worked.

Finding anything in the half light from outside and the piles of papers that seemed to be stacked precariously on any flat surface except the office chair was going to be impossible. There were all sorts of interesting bits of information that he couldn’t do anything with when half of the underground wanted him dead, and the other half were trying to book him for jobs. Flicking past a print out of a series of bank transactions that suggested more than one US Senator was accepting very dirty money, he found what he was looking for. A letter from Frankie to Shi Huan Inc. dated a month before Neena had told him she had started working for Frankie. The letter was in Chinese, not a language Clint had all that much experience with, but he could read the signature at the bottom,  Tem Borjigin , one of very few alias’ that were whispered about when Zhang Tong came up. No one knew which was the man’s actual name, or if none of them were. But it was the lead he needed. A company and an address in Ulaanbaatar.

With careful attention he returned the pile back to exactly as he had found it, just like he had done for every other pile he had gone through. The sun was struggling to rise behind the storm clouds that were just starting to move on. He had to get back out the front door before the household woke up. 

The hallway was clear and he ghosted back down the way he had come as quickly as he could. He was steps away from being able to open the door that logic told him would put him back in the foyer when he heard a door open behind him.

His luck had official ran out when a scream split the still morning air.

If they were screaming, they weren’t shooting. Yet. He left stealth behind in favour of speed. Sprinting the last few steps and wrenching open the door he was in the foyer even as the screaming continued.  His door opens at almost the exact same time as the one across the foyer. The thug from the hotel filling the doorway, a gun already drawn in his hand and pointing right at Clint’s centre mass.

A double echo of two gun’s retorts crashed through the space. Every highly polished surface sending the sound back through the room.


	6. Chapter 6

On a SHIELD jet, it was a relatively quick four hour jump from Sweden back to the States. Senior Agent Phil Coulson used the time well. Between walking up the ramp in the dark, quiet outpost and walking back out of it into the noise and light and movement of the Triskelion , he had written up a whole op proposal. He would have liked to have returned to New York and hopefully his own apartment, but the Director was currently in DC for meetings on the Hill and he had been ordered to report directly to him, not to Maria at HQ. 

The nods of acknowledgement from almost everyone he passed lacked the fear that had lurked in the back of all of the Scandinavian base’s eyes. It was refreshing and a pleasant return to normal, especially in light of what he was about to propose to his oldest friend.

Not being an Assistant Director, he didn’t have an office ready to meet him in any base that he walked into. Fury was the only one to have an office in every base and every outpost. Instead, he made do with the conference room next to Nick’s office. There wasn’t scheduled to be that long a wait between Phil arriving and Nick finishing with whichever Senator or Congressman he was meeting with, see: threatening. Experience said that meant nothing. Fury could be waiting for Phil already, or it could be two days before they laid eyes on each other.

Armed with a mug of steaming, a spoon would stand up in it, black coffee courtesy of Annabelle, Fury’s long suffering secretary whom Phil had gone out of his way to befriend over the years, he settled himself in for the wait. Soon, the 16 seater conference table was littered with piles of papers and laptops, maps and photos. 

Other than Annabelle gliding in and out every hour or two to replace his coffee and ask after his latest trip, he was left alone as outside the tall glass windows the sun set over his Nation's Capital. As street lights flickered on, casting the city in a golden glow under the growing cloud cover, Annabelle stuck her head in the room one final time.

“Agent Coulson?” She called softly for his attention. Her own tendency towards calm quiet and not wanting to sneak up on someone armed came together to avoid startling him.

“Yes?” He was left blinking furiously trying to adjust his focus from the small cramped handwriting of Agent Hollister, who was currently the active analyst on Hawkeye’s case, to the woman’s elfen face that was half in shadow.

“Director Fury won’t be joining you tonight. Would you like me to find you a hotel before I leave or is on base housing ok?” If it had been any other agent she was asking for, she would have already booked them a room in one of the dozen cleared hotels within walking distance of the Triskelion ,  but Agent Coulson had always been different. Willing to forego the luxury that his position afforded him. Annabelle heard the gossip, she heard people call him a robot or a science experiment that didn’t need rest or have feelings, but she knew better. She had been Fury’s assistant since he first had one assigned to him and through him had known Phil Coulson for years, since he was a Junior Agent himself. She knew that between all of his responsibilities as an active field agent and Fury’s right-hand man, his only consideration when choosing accommodation was a flat surface and a locked door. 

“A bunk on base is fine, thank you Annabelle.” His smile of thanks was tired.

A quick nod was his only response as she slipped back out the door. Five minutes later an email pinged into his inbox with a floor, room number, and an entry code. It was the room he normally stayed in when he was in DC, it’s spectacular views of sunrise over the Potomac and proximity to both the armoury and two different easy exits being large draws.

He continued to work as the building emptied below him. The clicking off of the HVAC at midnight finally drew him from his work. The proposal for luring Hawkeye out of hiding took up one end of the table, the middle concerned a wider breakdown of who might have taken a hit out on him recently (it was not a short list), and directly in front of him, and what he was currently working on, was the active investigation into the bloodbath in Helsinki. Angot Järvinen’s financials had come in during the flight and he had spent the last few hours putting his accounting degree to work parsing everything he could out of the lists of numbers and names. He now probably understood the broker’s business better than the man himself ever had, but that didn’t shed any light on how he had ended up dead in a parking garage.

At a place where he couldn’t do anything more without either more information or approval, he decided to call it a night. Only as he was packing up the papers did his long day hit him, exhaustion rolling over him in increasing waves until it was like a Tsunami of lost sleep and stress was threatening to pull him under. It was all he could do to stumble his way from the conference room down what seemed like an unending number of floors, but was actually five, and across the building to his room. Someone had been there before him. His suitcase was beside the bed and a plastic wrapped chicken salad sandwich was sitting on the bedside table. Blessing building services, he ate with one hand and undid buttons, and cufflinks, and shoes laces with the other. Down to his boxers he fell into bed and was asleep before his head hit the pillow. 

= + =

The rising sun stabbed into his closed eyes like firebrands in the hands of a particularly vindictive Medieval Torturer. With a groan he tried to stuff his head under the insufficient pillow. It didn’t help. WIth a huff he flipped the offending item to the ground and sat up. Futaly trying to rub the tired out he was eventually able to open his eyes in a bloodshot squint. The view out the window, passed the blind he had been too far gone to close when he got in, was magnificent. An early winter snowfall had turned the grey and dead landscape he had flown in over yesterday, into a white wonderland.

After setting the standard issue coffee maker to dripping he dropped a liberal dose of artificial tears into his eyes and pressed a warm towel to his eyes. A quick fix to take him from exhausted, overworked middle-age to I can kick your ass six ways to sunday and run a marathon after, just try it. By the time the coffee maker was beeping the end of it’s cycle, the towel had cooled and he felt halfway human again. A shower, shave, and the whole pot of coffee finished the transformation.

Stepping into the concrete hallway that was ubiquitous to every SHIELD building everywhere, he knew that no one would be able to pick up on the exhaustion. Last night’s files were tucked under his arm and after a quick stop in the cafeteria for a coffee and a packet of donuts. The conference room was still mostly in shadow, facing north-west it only got afternoon sun. He the cold dark, Phil settled in for another long wait.

The detritus of a working Senior Agent took over the room as the day wore on. Unnoticed by Phil the room lightened and the tide of a busy workplace grew. His stomach was just beginning to make inroads in distracting him from work when the first person he had seen all day stuck their head into the conference room.

“There you are Sir. Director Fury is on his way in and will see you straight away. He has given you permission to wait in his office.” Annabelle smiled at him and waited in the doorway as he picked himself up to follow her.

Phil took her words to actually mean that Nick had said ‘if he wasn’t ready and able to present anything and everything the director asked for the second he was back on base, he could consider it all denied and to get him ass back to New York.’

With a bit more swearing.

Nick’s office was exactly how Phil remembered it, although it had been a few years since he had been in the DC version. Tall, panoramic windows fitted with bullet-proof glass allowed a spectacular view across the international centre of power. The furniture was sleek, and modern. Chrome and glass were the main materials. All up it was cold and impersonal and he knew for a fact that Nick hated it. He hardly had a chance to settle into the metal monstrosity that passed for a visitor’s chair when The Director swept into the room.

“Coulson!” He barked.

So, that’s how it was going to be today. Phil mentally sighed to himself.

“Sir.” He stood to great his boss. He wouldn’t have bothered if it had been his friend walking through the door.

The meeting that followed was productive but impersonal. After three hours of pushing and pulling back and forth on the details of the op. Phil walked out of the fish bowl with an approved plan that was almost what he had walked in asking for with a few more levels of contingency and security than he would normally plan for, but the Director wasn’t willing to actually risk his best friend. 

Loaded down with papers, he trekked back to his temporary bunk. There was a flight back to New York in 45 minutes and he was determined to be on it. Having only arrived the night before and only being in the room long enough to sleep and shower, there wasn’t much of anything to pack.

He made it onto the jet with minutes to spare. A seat had been left empty at the front of the compartment for him and he gratefully sunk into it. The thirty minute jump was spent drafting and sending the briefing packets for his teams. 

Jasper had received his as the Junior Agent was waiting for him on the HQ’s roof. A cup of coffee in one hand and a pile of papers in the other. 

“Security team are already setting up outside your apartment, they will be in place within the hour.” Jasper started as soon as they were off the landing pad and had a hope in hell of hearing each other. “I can have the Javier Vasquez cover re-activated within two days and start approaching the brokers on Thursday afternoon.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Blood and First aid that is effective but absolutely not the recommended treatment plans.

Clint knew he had been hit. The sharp, burning punch on the front of his left shoulder pushed him back. Spinning his ninety degrees on the polished floor. 

“Son of a bitch.” He bit out under his breath. Pulling in a breath through clenched teeth, he brought his pistol up again.

The dick who had shot him was on the floor, Hawkeye’s bullet having hit true, between the eyes. The only one of Puglisi’s men who had gotten a look at him so far was dead. Brilliant red blood was already creeping across the white floor. Under the duel toned ringing in his ears from the gunshots, he could feel the thumping of footsteps racing down the hallways in front and behind him. He had to get out of here.

Getting through the thick heavy wooden door without the use of one arm and slipping in his own blood cost him precious seconds. What seemed like a fucking  _ battalion _ of goons were flooding the room behind him. On instinct he dropped and rolled through the partially open door. A spray of bullets went over his head. A second impact hit him just above his right hip. He could feel the bullet lodged under his skin.

With a final heave he was through the door, at least two pouches had been ripped of his belt and were sitting useless on the floor of the marble foyer. Around the pain from his wounds and dizziness from quickly worsening bloodless, he couldn’t remember what was in those particular pouches but he didn’t have the time to go back for them.

The rich carpeting was easier to move across, soaking up his blood rather than creating a slip hazard. Getting the hatch open and his shaking body through it was a struggle but he managed it. A chill sweat breaking out on his skin, he attached himself to his rappelling line and was away.

His vision was swimming dangerously by the time his boots met the bottom of the maintenance shaft. The clank and groan of the elevator starting to move next to him, told him he didn’t have much time to get his feet back under him. Digging through the pouches that had survived, spilling half of their contents on the cold, dirty floor. In the second to last he found the little box of tampons he always kept on hand. Other than helping out someone in need, they were fucking fantastic for sticking in a bullet wound that you needed to stop bleeding  _ right the fuck now _ but didn’t have the time to stitch. With the little cotton cylinder shoved into his shoulder, nudging the metal already in there, he slapped a couple of plastic post-op bandages that sealed shit pretty well and started back down concrete tunnels that could easily become his tomb if he wasn’t careful.

Racing down concrete tunnels that he only had a vague sense of having gone down before. Allowing sense memory to get him back to the hotel. The path that had seemed long but acceptable only a few hours ago, now seemed endless.

He couldn’t tell if the drumming in his chest was pursuit or the thrumming of his own heart. In his shock, he almost brained himself on the short doorway that let into the basement of his hotel. While his thoughts had been vacillating between the burning in his hip and shoulder and that pretty blonde in London he had met two years ago, his feet had taken him where he needed to go.

Energy flagging he was only able to make it to the floor above the foyer before having to abandon the stairs and slip into an elevator. The mirrored interior showing a never-ending line-up of blood soaked assassins swaying on their feet. Between one blink and the next he went from the first to the fourteenth floor. Unsure how he got there, he tried to work it out, standing in the open doors, blinking stupidly at the corridor beyond. His thoughts were too sluggish to work it out.

The door trying to slide shut on his foot had him moving. Stumbling his way to his door. The second on the right. The russet carpet hiding the drops of blood from his hip and shoulder. At his door, the lock came into sharp focus but ran from his key when he tried to put it in. Pulling the little piece of plastic back and the lock came back. In and away, away and in. 

“Stay.” He told it sharply. He frowned down at the handle. Trying again, the lock obeyed and stayed in place. “Good lock.” He muttered at it as the little light flashed green and his door swung open.

He wasn’t sure when he had started leaning against the door but when it opened his was sent sprawling just inside his room. Without getting up, he shifted his legs and shut the door with a light kick. Well what should have been a light kick but ended up being a flailing push. Either way it got the job done.

He wasn’t sure how long he spent, laying spread eagle, panting on the floor. The room was booked for a few days but he had to get himself out of Chicago. He the longer he stayed the more likely it was that one of Frankie’s men was going to find him. The thought of the blue eyed agent who had helped him was what got him finally moving. He had what he needed, but the job wasn’t done. 

A whimper slipped out as he tried to get off the floor without aggravating either injury. By the time he was back on his feet, he was short of breath and shaking dangerously. The two steps into the bathroom was a marathon. He was Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a mountain, but the boulder was his body and the mountain was the bland hotel hallway that swam in and out of focus.Cold sweat coated his whole body. Shaking fingers slipped on the buckled and zips tof the body armour. Finally naked, he stepped into the lukewarm water. It was fire against his shoulder and ice against the rest of his skin. The first mouth full of water  was used to wash the thick taste of shock and adrenaline overdose from his tongue. THe second and third were drunk desperately. He needed to replace as many of his lost fluids as soon as possible. He wasn’t going to be peeing any time in the near future.

Pulling the swollen tampon from his shoulder was excruciating, but cleaning the wound was more important. Dried blood had created a seal around the cotton intrusion and breaking it pulled at already inflamed skin. it left Clint breathless with a dark red lump of cotton dangling from his fingers. He let it from to the bottom of the shower where it was quickly joined by the bandage from his hip. The wound was more of a graze that followed the line of his hip bone from high on his back to low on his stomach. That’s not to say it didn’t sting like a son of a bitch when the water hit it.

He stood under the flow of water for as long as he could stand, angling his shoulder and hip to get as much running water over both of them as possible and slowly swallowing mouthfuls of water. The water was still running hot when he finally flicked it off, God Bless endless hot water systems.

The adrenaline had burnt out and his limbs felt like well cooked spaghetti as he stepped out of the shower. He had to sit on the closed toilet seat to dry off, his legs unable to hold him up properly. The white towel was quickly stained pink, fresh blood mixing with the water to spread across his back and down his leg.  Once he was as dry as he was going to get at that moment, he wedged the ruined towel against his shoulder and shuffled into the bedroom, his right shoulder against the wall to keep him upright.

Trying to not use his left arm, keep the towel pressed against the wound,  _ and _ dig through his bag for his med-kit proved to be impossible. Grunting he draped the towel over his shoulder, cleaning up the blood was going to be a bitch as it was, he freed up his right hand to pull the black bag from within his bigger black bag. Shuffling back to the better light of the bathroom took a while.

Dumping the bag on the bench, he grabbed one of the emergency protein bars and shoved half of it in his mouth. Chewing was slow going, but he had time now. The kit was well organised, each tool clipped into its place and each package of single-use material clear labels in English and Braille. He’d found being able to tell whether an unmarked box was bandaids or asprin in the dark was handy. A pair of tweezers liberally doused with alcohol went into his shoulder and emerged bloody but with the mangled piece of metal clutched in it’s tiny teeth. Warm blood began pulsing down his back again. As flexible as he was, getting stitches that high up his back wasn’t going to happen. Super glue would have to do. He squirted half a bottle of peroxide into the wound and then half a tube of glue. With shaking fingers he held the wound closed for a long minute, giving the glue time to dry.

He had to sit back down and munch on the second half of the protein bar afterward. Waiting for his hands to stop shaking and his stomach to stop roiling. Eventually his body calmed down and he was able to clamber off the cold tiles and get back to patching himself up. The second half of the peroxide bottle was tipped over his hip. The liquid fizzed as it came in contact with the gouged flesh, bubbles pouring down his leg.

“Shit.” He yelped. He tried to mop it up with the towel that hardly resembled its friends anymore. 

A full set of butterfly stitched followed the disinfectant. He taped the shit out of a large piece of gauze and decided that was as good as it was going to get. Downing a couple of aspirin and clarithromycin and another large glass of water. He had drunk so much in the last hour that he could feel it sloshing in his stomach. With a second protein bar to munch on he started picking up every trace of himself in the room. Bloody bandages and the tampon from the shower, the pink towel, the pool of half dried blood that he had left on the polished hardwood in the entry. Peroxide soaked gauze cleaned up the every last trace of his blood. By the time he had finished the protein bar, the room was spotless.

He took his time carefully sliding clean clothes over the bandages, making sure the fabric was laying flat, hiding his injuries. The day was well on it’s way to being finished when he threw his bag over his uninjured shoulder and left the hotel room behind. He’d paid for three nights in cash, but he had done what he needed to in Chicago and getting out of the city was more important than sleeping. He slipped out a side door and into the blinding, white landscape of the post-blizzard city. In the twelve or so hours since he had parked his car, it had accumulated a couple of inches of snow. Getting it sort of dugout was an ordeal. Waiting for the car to be warm enough to drive gave him the time to slip a saline drip into his forearm. 

LA was his next stop. The large port and proximity to Mexico sustained a large underground for moving product, and people, in and out of the country.  He had a friend almost four hours south of Chicago, a farmer that supplemented his income as a middle man for a couple of different products going North and some others going South. For the right number he should be willing to fly Clint to California. It would save him a two day drive and give him a little bit of a chance to rest.

It had been a long week.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil has a bit of down time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of a short, filler chapter.

Phil stepped into his cold apartment. Oh, the temperature was fine, a perfect 68 degrees, kept that way by the automatic heating. The lack of another living thing, person, animal, nor plant, was what made it chilly. Lifeless and lonely. The last time someone other than him him had stepped through the front door, was the security and science team six months ago and they and his mysterious visitor were the first since he had moved in two years ago.

Normally when an Agent’s personal life had been as compromised as the package suggested his had been, the last place they were allowed to go was home. But if his plans to flush out whoever was gunning for him, and maybe the elusive Hawkeye, were going to work he needed to keep to his normal schedule. As much as he had one. Jasper had spent the last two days re-establishing his cover. In the morning he would drop the job to one of his contacts. A good seven hours before he had thought he would be ready. 

Phil had spent the last few days darting between meeting after meeting with other handlers and Senior Agents, handing off critical missions or projects that could possible be interrupted by an ill-timed assassination attempt. There were a couple of projects that were slow-burners that he got to keep and one more pressing mission that would probably benefit from a failed attempt on his life.

He hated the nagging feeling that he was leaving a job unfinished, he always had, but the Hawkeye recruitment had been firmly on that list for a while now and a chance to finally finish it wasn’t something he was going to pass up. Even if it meant he got to keep his other, frankly less interesting, projects. 

Earlier in the day, Maria had caught him grumbling as he had left a meeting with Senior Agent Randall Jones. The moment she saw SA Jones walk out after Phil, she had had to bite her lip to stop the gales of laughter from breaking out until the other agent was out of earshot. Then she hadn’t stopped laughing for almost ten minutes. She knew how much Phil disliked dealing with Jones. 

THe other man had never allowed any sort of informality while Phil had been a Junior Agent, and it hadn’t gotten any better since Phil had been promoted. He would still only answer if addressed by his full title but was never courteous enough to return the favour. The Senior Agent had spent every minute of their two hour long handover, second and third guessing every decision Phil had made on an ongoing operation in Mauritius. By the end of it, he had been ready to strangle the other Agent.  

It wasn’t that Phil thought his actions, or the actions of his team, wer above reproach, or that he resented the second set of eyes. It was that Jones dd all of that while making it obvious that his distrust of Phil and his decisions were 100% biased. By both Jones’ dislike of Fury being promoted ahead of him and having been poisoned by Blake while acting as the other man’s SO.

Shaking off the annoyance, he ventured further into his apartment. His night was spent at home, a frozen meal in front of TiVo’ed Project Runway, after a long hot shower trying to work out the kinks in his back that long hours behind a desk or around a conference table always caused. He was in bed by 10.oo pm and asleep by 10.05. Long years of sleeping where and when he could with the Rangers, still serving him well.

Early morning sun woke him up the next day, by glaring right into his eyes. Silently bitching out the sun and mornings both, he rolled over and stuck his head under a pillow. Futilely trying to go back to sleep even though he knew it would never happen. Once he was awake he was awake. Unless he was injured or drugged, the pedantic part of his frain felt the need to point out. It was at this point he gave up pretending that he was going to get back to sleep and rolled gracelessly out of bed, his knees hitting the carpeted floor with a dull thump. Landing just next to the still slightly pink patch where a stranger had bled only six months ago, for one strange night. He had meant to re-carpet but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. 

He had a thrilling day of not much planned to look forward to. Grocery shopping for food he probably wouldn’t eat, and cleaning bookshelves that would be covered in dust again before he could read any of the books. Half way through his shower, with shampoo sending suds down his body in little rivulets, he decided he wanted to get something achieved today! With so many of his portfolios passed off, and plans for him to be in New York for a little while, it was time he replaced that carpet. With an actual mission, as mundane was it was, to accomplish, he quickly finished his shower and had his laptop out and flooring showrooms pulled up on the screen to browse as he had his first cup of coffee for the day.

With caffeine swirling through his blood, a bagel in one hand, and his phone with a list of his top eight flooring shops, he headed out for the day. The first three were a bust, the first’s selection was too limited, the second tried to pass synthetic wool off as real wool, and the salesperson had been too much within minutes of him stepping through the door and he had beat a hasty retreat. His luck changed on the fourth try. A large airy room that took up half of a converted warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The sales person drifted by, pointed him in the direction of the wool carpets, before floating off again. Leaving him to browse in peace. 

He spent an enjoyable hour feeling up different fibres, and loop vs pile, and thicknesses. He had fun comparing colours and designs. All on his own. Noone breaking into his thoughts, no alarms demanding his attention, or emails screaming for more information. In the end he decided on a thick, pure New Zealand wool, pile carpet in a warm cream with a barely perceptible chevron pattern. With the sample tile in hand, he went in search of the sales assistant. By the time he walked out, he had an appointment for one of the carpet layers to come out to his apartment on Monday after work to measure and quote, and an assurance that after he had approved the quote it would only be a week and a half or so wait before it could be installed. The installation would take two days.

Pulling his jacket in close against the frigid temperature, he wandered his way back towards to subway station. Plans spiralling through his head for shifting his schedule around to accommodate the new commitments. 

The rest of the day was lost in a haze of cantaloupe vs honeydew, and bok choy vs spinach. The short winter day was ending as he lugged the bags of food back into his lonely home. The second the door was closed behind him, he could feel the lightness of a day well spent draining away and the chill of the night before creeping back into his bones.

Thank god the phone rang as he put the yoghurt in the fridge, the last of the groceries. He had to stop himself from diving across the kitchen counter in his hurry to get the phone, settling for speed walking around it instead.

“Jasper!” He cringed slightly at the eagerness that had slipped by his normally iron control. Clearing his voice, he continued. “How did things go today?”

“I dropped in on Rosa this morning.”

That was something Phil always appreciated about Jasper Sitwell, right to the point. No time wasted on greetings or niceties.

“She already knew about the job, but not who commissioned it. She knows of two people that have taken it and that it has been offered to others. I’m having Agent Santangelo bringing the hard copies of the files for the two she knows about.” Jasper paused, as if trying to decide whether to finish there or say one last thing.

Phil recognised that pause. That was Jasper’s ‘I’m about to stray into personal territory and I’m not sure if I want to’ pause. Without fail, Jasper had always continued. He couldn’t help but stick his nose in his friend’s business.

Not disappointing he did continue, “Your boy isn’t one of them.”

“Anything else I need to know?”

“Nope.” Jasper hung up on that final word.

Phil almost sighed with relief now that he wouldn’t be overheard. He was glad to have gotten some normal things done that day, but he never felt quite right in his own skin when he was away from work. And not having even an excuse to check his emails had been driving him slowly insane. Just Agent Santangelo’s anticipated arrival was enough. With a pot of tea steaming on the coffee table he settled in to wait.

He wasn’t waiting long.

Only half of his first cup had been drunk when the doorman called up that Santangelo had arrived. He let him up. Phil couldn’t be bothered donning the full Agent Coulson personna just to go down stairs and sign for some paperwork. The younger agent could come to him.

In shirt sleeves and socks he answered the door. Santangelo’s eye twitch was delightful. The other agent had only ever seen Phil completely buttoned up, and to now be confronted by a jacketless, tie-less, and Captain America socked at home Phil was a little too much for the man.

“Mr Agent Coulson, sir. I, um.” He cleared his throat, face bright red. “Agent Socks.. Sitwell! Agent Sitwell! Sent me with some paperwork.”

Phil had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing at the poor man. “Yes, I was aware you were coming.” There were going to be a new set of terrifying Agent Coulson rumours amongst the babies by morning, Phil could just feel it. He held out his hand to take the briefcase.

The moment the files were in his hands, Santangelo turned to leave.

“Agent.” Phil called out to stop him.

“Um, sir? Yes? Sorry.”

“I need to sign for them.” Phil could feel the wry smile spreading across his face, but could do nothing to stop it.

“OH! Right! Yes! Sorry!” With the signatures still wet, the thoroughly flustered Agent hurried away. He wanted to be anywhere but here.

Phil locked his door as he wandered back into the cold depths of his apartment. Collecting his teapot and cup, he set up at his dining room table. Laptop open and connected to the limited SHIELD network and Tommy Dorsey playing softly from his speakers.

With the second round of intelligence in, he could start refining the current mission parameters. Hopefully, one of the mercenaries now gunning for him, knew who had put the price on his head.


	9. Chapter 9

A small fishing trawler tacked its way down the US coast, edging its way closer to Mexican waters. It looked like any other of the hundred small boats in the area doing the same thing, following the fish.  Closer inspection showed something not quite right, men that weren’t moving quite as quickly as their fellows, bulges under clothes and stacks of rope and netting that didn’t sit quite right. Anyone who made it past the men on the top deck would find a boat nothing like what it was pretending to be. Instead of water ice to keep fish fresh for market, there was chemical ice to keep the people in line. Instead of fish hooks, there were machetes and guns. 

Below the drugs and weapons, there was one more layer to the boat. Two rooms hidden behind false walls. They were the most insidious operation on the boat. Human smuggling. Sometimes those being smuggled were high-level, wanted criminals, like Clint, but more often than not, the people in those two small rooms were the desperate, lost, or kidnapped. People destined to spend the rest of their lives in slavery, being used, abused and abandoned by humanity.

On this trip, Clint was sharing one of the rooms with another man. According to his tattoos, an enforcer for the M61s. Not a nice man. The assassin had exchanged curt chin juts with the other man and then they had both settled into their bunks for the overnight trip from LA to La Paz and proceeded to ignore each other.  The less information they had on the other, the better. You couldn’t really trust someone using human traffickers after all.

At 4 in the morning when the sounds and smells of human suffering drove Clint out of the small room and up onto the deck. Keeping out of the way of the people pretending to fish, he watched the desert coast glide past. Most of it was still deep in the shadow of night, but glints of golden light on the shore picked out evidence of normal human life. Great swathes of sky above them was glorious with stars. Clint always enjoyed being in places where he could see the stars.

Slowly the boat rounded the end of the Baja Sur and chugged its way North again. Joining the other fishing trawlers, some legitimate others not, they worked their way into the harbour. Clint returned to the hidden room. Staying still and silent as the bribes were slipped into pockets. Alone he would have lounged on his rack and counted chips in the paint or something to pass the time, the looming presence of the enforcer put paid to that idea. Instead, they sat in uneasy silence. A single, hard knock of a knuckle against the wooden door broke the tension.

Shouldering his bag, Clint was out the door and back into the fresh, salt laden air quickly. Wanting to be out of the same space as the other man who just gave off waves of malevolence which had Clint’s hackles up the whole time.

The small beachside city was just beginning to wake up to the right of the fishing port. The lights of a waking population competing with the sun rising across the water. Once away from the water his feet turned North and inland. Walking normally, it would take him just over an hour to get to the little airfield outside of the city where he would meet the smugglers who had agreed to let him take a berth for a price that was exorbitant but about what he expected to pay for last minute transport.

There was no way for him to hide in the wide open space of low scrub and rocks scoured clear and flat by the desert winds. Those times he had to hide in plain sight, he had found that walking with purpose kept people from questioning your presence.  A loose cotton shirt and hat pulled low over his bright hair had him looking like a local and getting out of town without anyone giving him a second look.

The airstrip was a slightly more uniformly flat stretch of earth sitting in a field of almost flat earth. Only one plane was there, a Legacy 500, that had men scrambling around it like ants before rain. The closer he got, the clearer their shouts were. Instructions being rattled off in spitfire fast Spanish. Half the words were whipped away by the rising wind. From what he caught, a storm was on its way and the pilot wanted to be in the air well before it hit.

From behind a small outcropping of sandstone, a man with a mean looking AK variant appeared, rifle pointed at Clint’s centre mass.

“Para o voy a dispara!” The man couldn’t have been older than twenty, deeply tanned skin still unlined by the hard decisions of the life he had chosen.

“Busco a Ronaldo.” Clint stopped where he was, hands held away from his body but not up. Just wide enough to give the appearance of compliance.

“Boss.” The boy shouted without taking his eyes of Clint. Good, the kid might survive to see his twenties when they did arrive.

“Qué?” A burly man standing over the little plane yelled back.

“Ronin.” Clint supplied when the boy faltered.

“Ronin te esta buscando.” He stumbled a little over the foreign moniker.

The burly man, hopefully Ronaldo, waved Clint through. He smiled and nodded as the boy dropped back out of sight.

“You have my money?” Hopefully-Ronaldo asked in broken English.

Wordlessly, Clit dug a thick stack of American bills out of his bag and handed the whole thing over. He had counted it out on the flight to LA after they had agreed on the flight. Flashing how much cash you were carrying would just end with him getting his throat slit halfway across the Pacific and his still warm body being tossed into the drink for the sharks to dispose of. It was effective and Clint had done it himself before, but didn’t really want to meet that fate himself.

Probably-Ronaldo, flicked through the money, tossed his head in the direction of the plane and walked away. Taking it as the permission and order to board that it was, he climbed up the ladder at the tail of the craft and strapped himself in. Nothing for it now but to wait.

The plane island hopped from Mexico, to an outer Hawaiian island, south to the Marshall Islands, and then north again. Landing in the Northern Mariana Islands, Ogasawara Islands before making the final jump to Lainyungang in Mainland China. A distance that would have taken him 16 hours, took two days. Island hopping and the reloading of the plane eating away at time. Each sunset and sunrise turning up the volume of the clock in his head. He was half way back to where he had started. God, the Trans-Siberian had stopped just outside of Ulaanbaatar and now he was having to pick his way back there.

The smugglers plane, now putting out a ‘legal’ transmitter code landed at the Lianyungang Baitabu Airport, just one more private plane ferrying its multimillionaire passengers to their winter escape by the sea. Under the cover of a quickly gathering dusk, Clint slipped from the plane and then the airport. His fair colours stood out in the service areas that he had to get through, but once he had slunk out into the carpark, he was just another tourist backpacking his way across Asia.

The city’s underworld had the double whammy of being a tourist destination and a major port. Everything from knock off designer handbags and toys, to drugs and guns were moved through the back allies. He had only taken a handful of jobs in China since starting as a killer for hire, they kept most of their jobs in house, but his spoken Mandarin was much better than his written. Comprehension returning just from walking through the crowds.

The red light district gave way to the illegal gambling dens gave way to those dark places where unspeakable acts were sold, bought, and committed. The deep he got into the shadows the looser his shoulder and the knife at his hip became. Over fifteen hundred kilometres separated him from the possible home base of his target, but he was still in the man’s back yard. He needed information before he ventured closer. 

A day and a half passed before he found someone who would talk to him. Ronin was well known even in these parts, even if Clint wasn’t that one who had worn the name when the assassin had been here, and it opened doors that would have been closed in Hawkeye’s face. Putting it about that he was looking to align himself with the deadly Crime Lord, a soft spoken lady of the night approaching him at dinner his first full night in town. 

He had chosen a hole in the wall that was dirty and overcrowded, a not so small family crammed in together in the kitchen which was the only part of the stall undercover. All of the seats were plastic outdoor settings that had been sun bleached white with age. Every seat was taken and the vigour with which people were eating told him it was good. He had to wait a few minutes before a seat opened up, a couple in business attire finished their dinner and wandered off. He snagged one of the seats as quickly as he could, there were other people waiting. 

At first he didn’t pay any attention to the woman who had taken the other available seat, with the amount of people waiting it wasn’t going to stay vacant long even if that meant they had to sit next to the gweilo. The lack of movement in his peripheral was what caught his attention. Everyone else had tucked into their rice and crab the minute they got a seat, but she was just sitting there.

Looking up from his own food, he immediate met her eye. She had been watching him. In most situations he would have felt her eyes on him, but he was so out of place here that half the damn neighborhood was watching him. She was just another set of eyes among a hundred others.

“Shì?”

“Nǐ shì xúnzhǎo táng de wàiguó rén ma?” Her voice was quiet under the crash of noise in the busy marketspace. 

“Wǒ shì” He answered, leaning in to hear her better and to put himself in a position to grab her if she tried anything.

“Lái.” She ordered, standing and moving quickly through a group of tourists from Beijing. 

Abandoning his dinner, he followed. For an hour he followed as she dodged and danced her way around people and through alleys. She slowed and let him catch up once they were in the depths of the most disreputable area of the city. Stopping in front of the gates to a rundown courtyard house, she waved him forward. The building would once have been magnificent, but time and disinterest had left it to go to ruin.

In he went. Stepping through the rotting wooden gates was like stepping into another world. Another time. The garden inside the walls was cared for. Trees carefully pruned and shaped into mythological animals. A fountain in the centre had clean water burbling over the top and down the sides. He wouldn’t be surprised to turn a corner and stumble upon a group of Tang noble women in bright silk robes giggling over their embroidery. Had he been drugged?

The click of a walking stick on cobbles pulled him from his stunned awe. An old woman half Clint’s height and a quarter of his weight slowly clicked her way across the garden. Stopping beside the fountain, they stood and observed each other. Twenty feet and 70 years separated them. SHe was old enough to be his mother’s grandmother, but her dark eyes were no less sharp for it. Their years had only added to them, not take away. Not yet.

“Hm.” She harrumphed eventually. “Come.” She sounded British.

She turned and began making her way back the way she had come. Clint couldn’t not follow her. His feet moving before his mind had told them to. The air itself was pushing him forward. The large reception room on the other side of the courtyard was as well appointed as the garden had been. Rich red and gold tapestries lined the walls, highly polished rosewood furniture was widely spaced around the room. The lady had settled herself at a table off to one side, a porcelain tea service steaming on the glass tabletop.

“Sit.” She commanded.

He did.

“Hm.” She hummed again once he was settled. Casting an eye over him again, she poured them both a cup of tea.

He drummed a knuckle against the wood.

Her dark eyes watching sharply as he picked up the fine ceramic and drank. What was he doing? Drinking something from someone he didn’t know? Without thinking about? Without watching her drink first? She hummed again. His thoughts skittered off, caught by a brush painting behind her. A wide landscape was rendered in a few strokes, hordes of people flowing towards a distant mountain range and a force standing before it. Arrows flew towards the running group. His archer’s mind followed the course of the arrows flight, so many would die. Something about that wasn’t right, but the twists of steam from his cup twirled whatever it was away.

“You hunt Chiyou.” It was a name he hadn’t heard before, but it sounded right. Was this Tong’s true name? And why did it matter so much if it was?

“Yes.” He answered even though she hadn’t really asked.

“Good. I am Jiutian. I will help and then you will owe me a favour.” 

A warning bell rang deep in Clint’s mind. Owing this woman a favour would be dangerous. He was only going after Tong to repay a favour he didn’t want to owe in the first place, to pay that back by taking on another debt wasn’t right.

“No.” He gritted out.

“Than Chiyou will live and your friend will die. Better to owe me a favour than a dead man.” She shrugged as if it made no difference to her, who he owed a favour to.

How did she know about Coulson? His mind was moving slowly, trying to work through an image he couldn’t see.

“Why do you want Tong dead?” He finally managed to collect enough of a thought to ask.

“That is none of your concern. I can tell you how and where to kill him though.” She refilled his empty cup.

All he could do was nod dumbly and pick up his fresh tea.

She smiled and began talking.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I do not speak Spanish or Chinese. These translations are from google translate and are probably only 50% right. If you know what they should be please let me know and I will update it.
> 
> Para o voy a disparar - Stop or I’ll shoot  
> Busco a Ronaldo. - I’m looking for Ronaldo  
> Qué - What  
> Ronin te esta buscando - Ronin is looking for you  
> Shì? - Yes  
> Nǐ shì xúnzhǎo Tong de wàiguó rén ma? - Are you the foreigner looking for Tong  
> Wǒ shì - I am  
> Lái. - Come


	10. Chapter 10

A week, and then two passed quietly. The carpet guy came and quoted and a date for the end of the month was set for his team to replace his stained floor covering. That filled the first three days of his reduced workload. The next week and a half was torture. He would prefer being shot at by high level assassins before he had to look at another personnel file. Some sadist in HR had decided that with Phil at mostly loose ends, he was the perfect person to go through the latest lot of baby agents and assign them to their first posts and supervising officers.

It was boring and thankless. It was a job that was normally assigned as punishment because of how boring and thankless it was. Flipping closed the last folder, he sat back and glared at the completed paperwork. He dreaded what they would assign to him next. Opting for coffee before opening his email to find out, he shut up his office and headed out. Hopefully, the unrecycled air of the city streets would help minimise the tension headache that was building in his shoulders and the base of his neck.

The sidewalks were as full as they ever were in New York. Being another anonymous face in the crowd was comforting in an odd way. He was so often complimented for being the invisible man, the bland suit that everyone skipped over. When it was in an official capacity it was a trait to be admired, to be praised. In his personal life it wasn’t, he could sit in any bar in the world and not a single person would approach him, even when he wanted them to. Most people would think that being overlooked when he was out on a coffee run would fall into the personal capacity, that people knocking into him and not even apologising would wrankle. But it didn’t. No one apologised to another pedestrian in New York, he could be the same invisible as everyone else instead of the pointed invisible of being invisible in a social setting. 

Invisibility didn’t last long when shots were fired and you were the only one not to duck for cover. The first shot zipped through an old woman in a business suit three steps ahead of him. At her scream and the crash of the large caliber bullet hitting the pavement, the crowd parted like the red sea in front of Moses, people diving for any cover they could find. The second impact was at the toe of Phil’s highly polished business shoe. He saw the trajectory of that second shot. It was enough for him to get the hell out of the line of fire before the shooter found their mark.

He was close enough to the office, that after a single phone call to Jasper, a tactical team would be on  the shooter’s location within minutes. Now, his job was to not get shot. A third bullet had soared through where his heart had been seconds before. No more followed it. He was out of sight and whichever of the people who had accepted the job was currently shooting at him, they had to have realised that he would have called it in. If they were intelligent, they would have been bugging out the second the third bullet missed its mark.

Phil hoped that they were moderately smart. Smart enough to have figured out who had hired them. Not so smart that they had ghosted by the time his team got to their nest. For once he was going to get his wish.

Five minutes after the first shot, a squadron of NYPD cars raced onto scene. SWAT and ambulances with them. From his place crouched behind a planter, he knew the latter wasn’t needed. The woman who had been hit was gone. Her blood stained the concrete in a still expanding pool. Too much for her to have survived.

Three minutes after the NYPD arrived, SHIELD as FBI were on scene. Jasper leading them. At the sight of his friend, Phil stood. The smaller man wouldn’t be here unless the threat had been neutralised, one way or the other. He would have been in the high rise two blocks down where the shots had come from.

“It was Miller.” Jasper greeted him with. “Got her alive.”

“Let’s go.” Phil started for the perimeter the NYPD had set up.

“Hey! You can’t leave!” A voice called from behind them. They both ignored it, ducking under the tape a tech was rolling out and merging with the crowd that had gathered. The rest of the SHIELD contingent Jasper had brought with him stayed behind, collecting information and data that might help but would probably end up being just more reports for them to store and not actually provide any useful intelligence. 

The capture team had put Ashlie Miller, the gunwoman in one of the more battered of the interrogation rooms. A brown stain in one corner could have been old blood, it wasn’t it was from a water leak a few years ago, but it could, and had been, mistaken as immovable evidence of past torture. Its mere presence had broken more than one suspect in the past.

Ashlie didn’t look concerned. Her long hair was partially held back in a sloppy ponytail, half of it falling in her face. Whether by her own disregard or any harsh treatment she had received from the agents who had collected her, he didn’t really care. Her small frame was swamped in the hoodie she was wearing. All together she looked much younger than her file suggested she was. Less likely to be shooting at people. Phil would bet anything she had used the underestimation of many to her advantage in the past. That wouldn’t work with SHIELD. They regularly dealt with things that weren’t anything close to what they seemed. Any agent that was likely to fall for it didn’t last long here. Washing out to the CIA or NSA or any number of other more mainstream intelligence agencies.

“Ms Miller.” Phil stepped through the door. Being confronted by the man you had set out to kill might shake something loose. “You are having a bad day.”

She glared up at him from under her overgrown bangs. Mouth tightly pressed shit.

He flicked open the button of his jacket and settled into his chair. Taking his time to arrange himself as comfortable as he could in the cold metal chair and then meticulously spreading his files on the table between them. Keeping the covers closed but the tabs with their names in view.

“Before today, you weren’t on our radar as a threat.” That wasn’t 100% true, but until she had accepted the contract on him, she hadn’t been of any interest to them. “That will only go poorly for you. We know where you are from. Ms Ashlie Miller, born Anthea Morgan in Duluth Minnesota to Mrs Emily Morgan, teacher, and Mr James Morgan, mechanic. They both still live there. Do you get back to see them often?”

Her glare deepened.

“You should have tried and get back more often. Family is important.” The irony of telling someone to see their family, when he did everything in his power to avoid doing the same, wasn’t lost on him. “You aren’t going to get the option now. If you cooperate, maybe we will let you send them a letter every now and again.” Helapsed into silence, leaving space for her to start talking.

“I can’t cooperate if you don’t ask me something.” She finally mumbled under her breathe.

She probably thought it had been too low for him to hear, but in the stillness of the interrogation wing he heard every word. Unintentionally, she had given him an opening to exploit. His smile was purely internal.

“What was the job requirements?” He started with a question that wasn’t particularly revealing. Lead her into the answers he actually wanted. Let her get comfortable with the give and take.

“Kill you.” 

For two words it told him more than he thought it would. Most hits had requirements. Prove of death. Method of death. Location, time, something. To have a job that was just to kill, however and wherever you could get at the target told him that whoever wanted him dead wanted it desperately.

“Who did you get the job off?”

The questions continued. None of her answers were as helpful as that first one. He took a break after two hours, finally getting the coffee he had gone looking for earlier. Feeling magnanimous, and wanting to continue building the relationship, he got Ashlie one as well. Another hour of getting nowhere fast. He waved the guards into the room as he stepped out again.

“Take her to holding.”

“Sir.” One of them almost saluted, catching the movement at the last minute.

Phil found Jasper embedded in a pile of paperwork in the break room on that floor. Collapsing into the chair across from his friend,  he allowed himself to slump into it. With anyone else, he wouldn’t have let his guard down, keeping the straight-laced image of Agent Coulson wrapped around himself tightly. The tension headache that had been threatening earlier had well and truly taken hold.

“Didn’t go well, hu?” Jasper asked without looking up from a report that from his position reading it upside down, Phil thought was in Vietnamese.

“No. She didn’t know much. Grohl was the broker. And whoever wants me dead, really wants me dead. That’s it.” Having allowed himself a few seconds of visible weakness, Phil gathered his mental armour around himself again. Drawing himself up, back straight, sitting perfectly square in the chair.

“Better luck next time?” Jasper’s words were questioning, hesitant, but the smirk on his face when he finally turned his attention from his papers to Phil was purely evil. Needling.

“Thanks.” Phil response was adequately dry. Annoyingly, he wasn’t wrong. They would have to wait until the next person tried for his head.

= + =

His carpet went in. It looked good. It was the first change he had made to the apartment since he had moved in. The change from white, to cream carpeting wasn’t drastic but in a tiny way, the few rooms began to actually feel like they were his. Feeling like his space didn’t make it any less lonely though.

The work front wasn’t looking much better. In the week they had Ashlie in custody she hadn’t said another word. Literally not another word, they had a Junior, who was in trouble for a prank that had caught the wrong Senior agent in its radius, watching every second of footage from Ms Miller’s cell. She hadn’t even answered the ancient latino man who supplied the prisoners with their food when he had asked if she had a preference between chicken and beef. In the years that Phil had been with SHIELD no one had ever been rude to Mr Ramirez. He hadn’t thought it was possible. Fury was polite to Mr Ramirez.

To top it all off, no one else had made an attempt on his life. Not the other assassin they knew about and none of the probable score that they didn’t. It was frustrating and baffling in turns. The contract had been put out on him weeks ago and so far only one attempt had been made? Was he too protected behind the walls of SHIELD and his doormanned building? Annoyed at the lack of progress, he abandoned his bedamed administrative work and went in search of Jasper. He had been supposed to touch base with Rose that morning and hopefully would have some news.

Jasper was in the third place Phil looked for him. The other man’s office was locked up tight, he wasn’t in the cafeteria, but Phil struck gold with the break room on the biochemist’s level. Jasper fancied one of the researchers but was too chicken shit to talk to the woman, so instead he chose to frequent her main source of coffee. He had tried to lie to Phil about it the first time, play it off as if R&D had better coffee than the rest of the building, but had folded under the weight of the lie within minutes under Phil’s accusing glare.

“You should just ask her out.” Phil spoke from right behind Jasper. Having come in to find the other man sneaking glances at Dr Brand through the glass that separated the little kitchen from the lab spaces.

“God damn it Phil! Don’t sneak up on me like that!” Jasper groused after jumping at Phil’s sudden appearance. “And I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

Phil just shrugged and sat in the seat beside Jasper, the one that meant for Jasper to keep watching the good doctor, he would have to lean around Phil. “Did Rose have any news?”

“I shouldn’t tell you. Make you read it in the report.” Jasper threatened, at the same time holding out the printed copy of his report, not actually intending to making Phil wait.

Phil sped read through the short document, a shark like smile, all teeth and no good humour, spread across his face. “Hawkeye took the bait.”


	11. Chapter 11

Fog drifted through his vision. Shapes swimming in and out of focus. Colours shifting behind curtains of smoke. His mind watched it all happen, unconcerned. Observing without judgement. 

Anemic sunlight dribbled between almost kissing eaves, three stories above where he lay. He was propped up against a wall, his legs being nudged and kicked by people where they were spread across half the width of the little street he was in. He didn’t recognise any of it. He didn’t know what day it was, or where he was, or who he was. For hours, or minutes, or seconds, he lay on a dirty street without a care in the world.

Eyes tracked movement. Movement morphed into recognition. The street was somewhere in Lainyungang. Something was pressing against the edges of his consciousness, demanding entry, but the fog held it back. Uncaring of the urgency of mortal time.

“Gweilo.” A man spat at him when he tripped over and out stretched leg.

He watched the man’s back as he retreated. The word set off a spark of light within the fog. The image of a slip of a woman watching him, her face half hidden by the deep shadows of a poorly lit area late at night. The split second of clarity faded. The spark of memory was followed by another and then another. The fog cleared slowly. Shapes coming into focus and staying there, mostly. Highlights brightening and shadows darkening until contrast returned to the world.

His name was Hawkeye. Or Ronin. Or Clint Barton. He had had so many names, which one was his? A tapping of a walking stick pulled his eyes from the long gone back of the rude man. Turning only his head, he watched as an old woman made her way down the street towards him. The people unconsciously moving out of her way, Moses parting the Red Sea.

She tutted when she drew even with him. “This won’t do.” She whacked his leg with her cane. The connection was hard. Stinging. “Up.” She commanded.

He glowered up at her. Not moving.

She scowled down at him and hit him again.

“God lady. What’s your problem?” He pulled his leg away before she could hit him again. The movement triggered something in his body and he kept moving. Rolling away from her and to his feet.

“Good.” She nodded once and then moved through into the crowd again. They parted and then swallowed her whole.

He was left leaning against the wall and rubbing his shin where a bruise was already forming. Crazy old broad. Clint pushed away from the wall, stumbled a few times as he got his legs under him, and started for the mouth of the little street. He needed to get on the road to Karakol. His feet stuttered to a halt. Karakol? Why would he go to Kyrgyzstan? He was going to Ulaanbaatar. No, something deep inside said. Tong was in Karakol, in the Tian Shan Mountains.

Well fuck.

Up until five seconds ago, Clint had known nothing more about Kyrgyzstan than any other person that hadn’t grown up in the area, it was in Asia and had a weird name. Yesterday, he would have been hard pressed to pick it out on a map and he had been to three of its five neighbors.

He had no contacts in the area. No information on who ran the underground of the city, or the country. A face he had never seen before told him that wasn’t quite true. Zhang Min , his mind whispered.  He was a broker in Linyi. The shadow man had contacts with a smuggling operation that flew into Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Clint didn’t trust it.

There was more going on here than he could figure out. His famed sight couldn’t see through the mist of whatever was happening to the truth behind it. No. He was going to go to Ulaanbaatar. Follow the information from Chicago over whatever the hell this was.

He wound his way from the little street to progressively larger and cleaner roads. Eventually moving onto a main boulevard. A dark grey sedan with a badge he didn’t recognise caught his eye. It looked like a hundred others that were speeding past him. Ten seconds to jimmy the lock and fifteen to hotwire it. Somehow he had lost a whole night. It was peak hour and it took an hour to creep from where he had taken the car to the Hanting Express, where he had left his bags. 

He was checked out in under five minutes, grabbing his bags were packed and ready to go and dropping his key in the little slot. Noone gave him a second look, there were enough tourists in this part of town that he could move about pretty anonymously.

It was a just over a full day of straight driving from Lianyungang to Mongolia. He drove straight north out of the little port city.

An hour and a half later he pulled the stolen sedan to a stop outside the restaurant that Zhang Min worked out of.

What the fuck?

He tried to get back in the car, but found himself pulling open the door to the restaurant himself. Something was forcing him to follow the trail someone had planted in his mind. The little old lady with her sharp stick. That alley hadn’t been the first place he had seen her. A flash of a fountain in a lush garden took him over. Favours being exchanged over tea and under the cover of night. One favour for another wasn’t a bargain he would have made. She had fucking drugged him. 

He knew it was more than that. This compulsion to follow the seeds she had planted was more than drugs, but his mind shied away from giving it a label. Superstition and karma had been woven through everything the circus had done, but magic was a step too far.

The small man behind the counter of the little restaurant glanced up at the jingle of the bell over the door. Sharp eyes in a face lined with age swept over him. Without a word he tipped his head towards the back of the thin room. A single door on the back wall stood open, steam and noise billowed from behind it. Clint’s feet moved towards it, the pull from just below his navel too strong for him to resist. Between one blink and the next he went from the middle of the half full restaurant, to standing  in the crowded office at the back of the building.

Zhang Min was hunched over a large leather bound ledger. He huffed at Clint’s entrance.

“Nǚshì dì shǒu zài nǐ shēnshang.” Min murmured. He could have been younger than Clint or old enough to be his grandfather, in the half light that filtered in from outside and the dull glow of a single dusty lamp it was impossible to tell.

“Xiǎnrán dì.” Clint didn’t know which Lady he was referring to, but it didn’t really matter at this point.

“Nǎlǐ?” Min flipped through the ledger as he waited for Clint to answer. Column after column of neat logograms had been printed on page after page.

“Almaty.” Clint didn’t know where the answer came from, but he hated that he had it. He hated that he couldn’t hold the three syllables behind his teeth and walk out of the little room.

“Jīn wǎn. Shíyī. Yitangzhen.” Min finally met Clint’s eye, waiting for an acknowledgement which he never got.

At the short words, the binding on Clint’s body loosened. He was able to get the hell out of there. Racing for the sedan, he pulled into traffic and drove. There wasn’t any point in trying to get out of the city, he knew that come 11pm he would be at the meeting point in Yitangzhen. He drove through streets thick with cars and bikes and people on foot. Aimless.

At eight he stopped at a strip mall on the edge of Yitangzhen. Gathering food and camping gear, he loaded up the stolen car. By ten he was back in the car, weaving his to the little air strip that the smugglers used. Two miles from his destination, he abandoned the car. Wiping it down and loading what he needed into a hikers backpack, he slung it and a weapons case that had appeared in the car at some point that day over his shoulder. The things he couldn’t take with him were distributed to the people begging on the streets that he darted down.

With five minutes to spare, he edged his way through a hole in the chain link fence. An older Cessna sat alone on the tarmac. Circling the plane, Clint found someone sitting on the boarding stairs.

“Nǐ shì wǒ nǚshì dì nánrén ma?” The man, boy he couldn’t be older than twenty, asked when he caught sight of Clint coming under the wing of the little plane.

“Shì”

The boy stood and waved Clint up the stairs behind him. Bounding up the stairs, he waited for Clint at the top.

“In there.” He pointed into the stripped down interior of the plane. Clint stepped past him and the door was hauled shut. The boy disappeared into the cockpit, leaving Clint to strap himself into one of the jump seats that had been bolted to the fuselage. The rest of the space was taken up by boxes and bags of cargo that Clint didn’t want to know the contents of.

Barely two minutes after clicking the  last buckle into place, the plane started rolling forward. It taxied slowly down the runway, turned, and thundered down the tarmac. Bumping over the unkempt concrete it gained speed. The vibrations of the air drag on the metal rattled through the whole machine. With a jump the wheels left the ground, and they were soaring. They climbed at a steep angle for ten minutes, the force of to threatening to pull Clint from his seat the whole way.

Eventually they evened out. Out the little window behind his right shoulder, Clint could see marshmallow puffs of clouds drifting below them and endless swathes of stars twinkling cold and uncaring above. He settled in for the flight.

He couldn’t relax enough to drop off to sleep fully, but he had allowed his mind to settle into a floating, easy space that was aware of what was happening around it but not actively doing anything either. The tilt of the plane tipping him towards the nose just over three hours later pulled him from his reverie. For half an hour, they circled, losing height each time. Finally, the bump and thud of the tires on uneven ground and the reassertion of gravity signalled their arrival.

Before they had fully rolled to a stop, Clint was out of his seat, bags slung over a shoulder and at the door. The second they had slowed down enough that jumping wasn’t going to land him in hospital with two broken legs, he had flung the door open, was on the ground with a hard thump was sliding unseen into the dark night. He had had time to think on the flight. Whatever that old biddy had done to him, he couldn’t not do what she wanted. So better to get it done and get back to keeping Agent in the world of the living.

An all-terrain vehicle almost as old as he was sat waiting in the little parking lot next to the dirt runway. Keys in the ignition and a full tank of gas. His bags went in the back and he merging with the two other vehicles that were on the road at this time of night before the plane had come to a full stop behind him. 

It was a lonely drive. Long stretches of highway through a patchwork of farms that reached green fingers into the foothills of towering mountains on his right and slid down to the shores of a lake and then desert on the left. It was still deep morning when the glimmer of light between the trees that had started appearing as the road had wound into the foothills was the first indication that he was closing in on the border.

When he was just outside the distance that a normal person would start seeing the light, he turned the truck off the road. An overgrown trail that was little more than an animal path led him away from the road and into the claustrophobic confines of a snow muffled forest. He knew it would lead him across the border and connect with the highway three miles on the Kyrgyzstan side. Deep in his gut, he knew where it would go, even though he had never been to Kyrgystan before. He could see the fucking road sign that was a mile further down that told him how many kilometers it was to Jergalan and Keng Suu. The anger at having his mind fiddled with flared deep in his gut, burned out through his whole body until the tips of his fingers tingled with it. He would never forget this, this intrusion into a place that should have been safe from anyone but himself. 

He didn’t care that it was apparently taking him to where he probably would have ended up on his own, it was the principle of the thing. He had spent so long under the thumb of someone else growing up, foster parents, Barney, Trickshot, or the Swordsmen. An assembly line that he had thought he had gotten away from. Finally able to follow his own heart, or mind, or conscience.

Once again all of that had been taken from him. 

He had to put that aside. His anger had carried him through snow softened forests and foothills into a deep river gorge. The road ran beside a frozen river, if it had been spring he wouldn’t have been able to pass, the flood line was a good meter above the roadbed. The valley was beginning to climb higher and the tires kept hitting little patches of ice. If he didn’t pay attention to what he was doing, he was going to end up dead in a ditch, which would solve his compulsion problem but then he would have a being dead problem.

The deeper into the mountains he drove, the more ice and snow covered the road. Eventually he only knew where the road was because it was raised and unnaturally flat. Dawn started pinking the peaks of the mountains to his left, long streamers of golden light slowly unfurled down the smaller tributary valleys. It would have been beautiful if he could spare any thought for the landscape, instead of the slip and slide of his tires.

He turned off the road, bumping and sliding off the packed dirt and onto the gravel and sand of a valley floor. Bump, grind, slip, slide. It was slower going, he was going slower than he would walk on a leisurely Sunday stroll but the protection of the car was worth more than quicker progress.

For hours he picked his way up the valley, fighting the car for every inch. He knew which tributary he needed to turn up to circle his way around the village he was aiming for. By lunch he had come over the ridge into a large valley, he stopped the car out of sight of the next valley. It would take him a few hours to get through the snow to the vantage point that was in his head. This late in the day, he would lose the light before he got there. Rather than spending a night in the snow he bunked down in the car. 

Hours before first light broke, he finally left the car. Layer upon layer of clothes went on and then his weapons case over it all.

A pair of snowshoes got him on top of the dense powder. It took him two hours to get to the best point for a nest, arriving just as the sun was breaking over the mountains. Digging in, he settled to watch the tiny hamlet come to life. His sharp eyes watched as lights flickered to life below in the three buildings that were still in use. They were all multi-story brutalist blocks of concrete that dated from the Soviet occupation of the area. 

Small dots of movement around the edge of town would have been missed or ignored as a figment of imagination by anyone else, but Clint wasn’t just anybody. He could see better than most, and knew the movement were multiple teams of two, all of them with rifles. There was a lot more hardware visible than he thought an ex-mining community would have, but if Tang had his base here the guns made sense.

The sun rose, shedding light but no warmth on the wintry landscape. He lost the feeling in his toes. People moved back and forth between buildings and vehicles. Coming and going. No sign of Tang.

He was just starting to wonder if it would be better to dig in and stay the night in the lee of the small ridge he had been sheltering next to all day or go back to the car, when the village burst into frantic activity.

A large, black SUV was rumbling its way through the mountain pass and into the centre of the buildings. Men in long traditional fur coats piled out of the car. In the middle, a man in the most elaborate coat Clint had ever seen was surrounded and being hustled towards the largest of the three multistory buildings still in use. 

Standing, Clint strung the bow that had been waiting in the car for him. Its honey coloured wood dancing under his touch. It resisted the string for a second before accepting him, bending under his hand. In one smooth movement, he looped the string over the top notch and swung it up, his other hand reaching unconsciously for the quiver sitting at his feet. The fletchings on the arrow sparked and rippled in the sunlight, fire running down the arrow’s length.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

Release.

The arrow sung as it streaked through the air. Piercing the very light it passed through. Clint didn’t stay to watch it meet its mark, he knew it would. Strapping the snow shoes back on, he hurried away from his perch as quickly as he could, strung bow and quiver slapping his back as he moved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “The Lady’s hand is on you.”  
> “Apparently.”  
> “Where?”  
> “Tonight. Eleven. Yitangzhen.”  
> “Are you my Lady’s man?”  
> “Yes.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had meant for this chapter to be up last week but I got super sick and it just didn't happen. I hope you all enjoy. Things are coming to a head.

Phil didn’t go home that night. Or the next, catching a few hours of sleep on the ratty couch he had dragged into his office after the third time he had fallen asleep at his desk, and showering in the gym bathrooms. Oh, what a glamourous life he led. The time was spent gainfully though. He knew Hawkeye’s modus operandi almost as well as he knew his own. He knew what the other man looked for in his nests and that he had never hurt a bystander. His best bet at drawing the other man out would be during his morning runs. 

His pre-work, which normally meant so pre-dawn the sun wasn’t even thinking of rising in his hemisphere, route took him down to the river, through Battery Park, around the Museum of Jewish Heritage and back to his building. It wasn’t a long run, just over two miles, but he normally only used it to wake himself up, not as a serious work out. On his rare day off he would sometimes run it two or three times.

Working it a bit more regularly into his routine wouldn’t be too hard, and it wasn’t a completely new activity that would ping anyone’s radar. It was even in that god given package that had started this whole thing. He went home that afternoon, stopping on the way for take-out, all that was in his fridge was week old pizza that was starting to mummify with age. He rolled into bed at ten and then back out at four. A solid six hours was about as good as it ever got for him. Layering up with winter running gear he braced himself for the chill that he was sure was waiting for him. 

The three mile route took him fifteen minutes, it was nowhere near enough for him to feel like he had gotten a good work-out, but it was too fucking cold to stay out any longer. He raced up the stairs rather than risk a stitch waiting for the elevator. The endless hot water was a god-send.

Between the run and extra-long shower he was walking out his front door at his usual time. Another boring day of paperwork to look forward to. Fury wanted him going over threat assessments for operations in Eastern Europe, they had been having a run of bad luck in the area and the boss wanted to know if there was a new bad actor interfering with their people. It wasn’t the most thrilling work, but it was useful and more interesting than assessments of Probationary Agents.

It satisfactorily filled his days as he waited for the next person, hopefully Hawkeye, to kill him. Waiting for something to happen rather than going out and facing the situation head on didn’t sit well with him. After all, Rangers lead the way wasn’t just a motto for him, it was the lifeblood that pumped through his veins. It was why he had made an amazing Ranger and was climbing the ranks within SHIELD so quickly.

For three days he pick through the analysts reports from SHIELD, Interpol, and individual country’s intelligence and police forces. Slowly the threads of a large, titanic shift in the local underground began to form. Small but steady movement of money and people out of the region. Rats off a sinking ship.

He almost had it, the final threat that would bring it all together into a cohesive tapestry of the murky underbelly. Grit turned his eyes to sandpaper and he couldn’t remember the last time he ate when he gave it up for the night. He could push through, but risked missing something important. He packed what he could up to take home with him, the carpet team were due in over the next two days and he wanted to be home to supervise them, it wouldn’t do for them to stumble over the more  _ custom _ security features. 

The clock was ticking past midnight when his head hit the pillow. When his alarm bared into the dark room, he had only been asleep for a few seconds, or at least that was how it felt. 

Out into the cold, dark winter morning. The layer of new snow that had fallen and was still floating down would normally have been a thing of beauty to him, this morning all he could see was a slip hazard. He jogged his way around his route slower than normal, he didn’t want to take himself out of the field any longer than necessary and a broken leg would have him out for months.

He had reached the furthest point of his run, having passed the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and drawing even with the Skyscraper Museum. An arrow sliced through the air where his heart would have been if he hadn’t slipped on a patch of black ice. The sharp metal arrowhead scraped against the same ice that had saved his life. It had come from in front and to the left of him. Phil threw himself into the strand of bare trees to his right, putting the thick boles between himself and the sniper. How had Hawkeye gotten through the Agents watching that building?

A second arrow thudded into the tree he had just ducked behind, shaking the snow that had settled on it’s branches onto his head. Some of it went down the back of his shirt.

“Shit. “He swore at the frozen intrusion. Fingers stiff with cold fumbled his phone from his pocket. “Kinsey, this is Coulson. Someone is shooting at me from 10 West Street. How the hell did he get past Sierra?”

A burst of sound was too much for the phone line and it came through as static as Agent Kinsey started yelling. Rushed movement and overlapping voices came through under the static. With half an ear focused on the chaos in the ops centre, Phil shadowed from behind the tree he was sheltering behind. Moving from tree to tree, staying out of sight and working his way away from Hawkeye’s line of fire, because who else could it be?

A third arrow followed the second into the tree next to the one he had been sheltering behind. He hadn’t been spotted. Getting out of the stand of trees after that was a waiting game more than the most dangerous game of whack-a-mole in the world. Each movement was calculated to be as discreet as possible to avoid drawing the eye. One more line of trees stood between him and a corner of the building that would have him completely out of sight, when the road was suddenly swarming with agents in black suits and drawn guns.

“Agent Coulson? Sir?” Agent Kinsey stepped into the well of light below a streetlamp.

Phil moved out of his hiding place, still sheltered by the shadows under the bare branches, but visible if someone looked carefully. 

“Sir?” Kinsey didn’t see him. “Agent Morse, get your team to spread out through the woods. He might have been hurt.”

“That isn’t needed Agent Kinsey. I am quite alright.” He stepped forward, the movement catching Agents Kinsey and Morse’s attention. “Do you have an update for me?”

“We caught the suspect.” Kinsey was almost vibrating with excitement, he had seen the arrows, or been told the suspect had a bow on him, and had put together who it was. Being a team lead on the mission that brought in Hawkeye? He would be able to write his ticket into whatever post he wanted. The excitement was dampened slightly as he continued. “He killed two of Sierra team to get into position. It wasn’t much before he started shooting, he was probably waiting for you to go past and then got in position to wait for you to come back.”

What had happened to the mercenary in the last six months that he was killing bystanders? In all of the jobs linked to the archer, never once had he even hurt anyone that wasn’t the job or deserved it in someway. Phil’s visions of recruiting the Amazing Hawkeye were dwindling.

A cluster of people burst from the glass monstrosity that was the atrium of 10 West Street. Yelling echoed across the cordoned off street. Phil led the way across, the person in the middle of the huddle of agents stood a head above the others. Shaggy brown hair fell in lank strings below a knit cap. Skin showed sallow below the edge. The smooth lines of a longbow bobbed amongst the group.

That wasn’t Hawkeye.

= + =

Phil watched as they bundled the attempted assassin into a car before taking his leave. A hot shower and pot of coffee was waiting for him at home, and then a faux-hawk to interrogate at the office. He had corralled a junior agent, Warren, to supervise the carpeting team while he went to talk to the still-to-be-identified archer.

The scalding water beating down on his cold knotted muscles was amazing. Each pulse loosening a long held bit of tension. The shower gave him time to think. The suspect was older than Phil thought Hawkeye was, older and more feral. But how many expert archers taking hits were there? If Phil was right and this wasn’t Hawkeye, a thought he hadn’t shared with the other agents, he could probably give him some insight into where the other man had disappeared to.

Standing at the kitchen counter drinking his coffee from a travel mug and eating his toast over the sink wasn’t the most elegant way to eat breakfast but it did mean he didn’t need to deal with any dishes. The phone rang across the room, the short triple trill that told him it was the doorman from downstairs. Stuffing the last corner of toast into his mouth, he abandoned the sink to answer it.

“Good morning John.”

“Good morning Mr. Coulson sir.” The daytime doorman greeted him. “A Mr Warren is asking after you?”

“Send him up, thank you John.” He put the phone down, refilled his mug, and gathered his briefcase. He was ready to go when the young Agent knocked smartly on his front door. “Hello Agent Warren.”

The other man stepped in carefully, as if afraid he would break the apartment just by being there. “Good morning Sir.”

“There is coffee in the pot that you are welcome to. The carpet men should be here in an hour or so.” Phil handed over a set of instructions and keys before leaving Warren to it.

The anemic sunlight barely shifted the chill as Phil walked the five minutes to his subway station. The streets and sidewalks had filled while he was inside, well dressed masters of the universe sauntered down the pavements as if they were runways at Milan Fashion Week instead of New York sidewalks that smelt vaguely of urine. If his dad had had his way, Phil would have been one of them. Phil would always thank a God he wasn’t sure he believed in that he wasn’t.

Agent Beckman was waiting just inside the glass doors of SHIELD HQ when he pushed through into the slightly overheated interior. A coffee in one hand and a file in the other. Beckman offered both to Phil who took the file. He didn’t need it coffee, at least not yet.

“We have a tentative identification. A Sergeant Buck Chisholm.” Beckman narrated while Phil read along, looking at the photos and packet from the French Defence Office that supported what the Junior Agent was telling him. “He went from AWOL from the French Foregin Legion in the 1980s, spent some time as a low rent mercenary and then disappeared for fifteen years in the late 80s. Reappeared four years ago, working with a partner. Mostly doing robberies and intimidation rackets.”

The folder and Beckman painted a picture of a low level criminal who had no business taking a job of the level required to go after a SHIELD Agent, let alone a Senior Agent like Phil. He was either trying to move up in the world or had lost his fucking mind. It shouldn’t take long to figure out which one it was.

They had put Chisholm in an interrogation room on the same corridor as Ashlee… but at the other end, keeping them seperate to stop information being passed in the event they were working together.

Phil didn’t think it was likely but he. Hadn’t survived as long as he had in the Rangers and then SHIELD by not taking every precaution he could, when he could.

“Good Morning Sergeant Chisholm.” Phil silently stepped into the grey room in the archer’s blind spot. “I would say it was nice to meet you, but as we both know that would be a lie, let’s put aside the fake pleasantries?” He didn’t wait for the grizzled man to answer. “Excellent. You already know who I am and I know who you are.” He sat in the vacant chair across the table from Chisholm, put the folder on the table and flipped it open, the man’s original enlistment photo and paperwork on the top. That’s right, we know every dirty little secret you are trying to hide, it said.

‘Nothing left to say than.” Buck growled, his voice gravel with long years of smoking and shouting over the sounds of a battlefield.

“I disagree. There are still so many interesting things we could talk about. How about who is paying you?” Phil asked congenially, using the same tone of voice as he would at Sunday Brunch with his sister, nice and enquiring but not overly emotionally invested in the answer.

“No one would need to pay me to take your pasty ass out.” He sneered in response. 

“So you don’t know.” Phil made a note in his paperwork with a flick of his pen. “What’s your relationship with Hawkeye?” That one was a straight out guess, but how many people were running around using a bow and arrow to kill people? THere had to be some connection there.

“I killed the fucker.” Buck snarled, leaning across the table to get right into Phil’s face. “The little dickhead cried as I slit his throat.”

The hatred wasn’t quite what Phil was expecting, he would have guessed disdain or angry competitiveness at someone younger and better taking over his racket. But the disgusted hatred was an unpleasant surprise.

“So you do know him.” Phil didn’t buy that this over the hill, heap of withered man had taken out a man in his prime and who was used to fighting for his life. 

Buck curled his lip in a disgusting display of toxic masculinity but didn’t answer. It was the last thing he said. Phil spent two hours picking through the information Beckman had put together, asking about anything that peaked his interest, seeing if it shook anything loose. Nothing doing.

At lunch time, Phil exited the room. Beckman met him at the door, swapping the folder in Phil’s hands for the coffee in his. He needed it this time and nodded a quick thanks.

“Send some food in and then leave him there. We’ll see if he is feeling more talkative tomorrow.”

Phil dropped by his office to change out the papers in his briefcase, he wanted to take the folder with the little they had gathered on Hawkeye’s early activities and compare it to Chisholm’s file see if there was any crossover. None of it was particularly classified so he headed home. He could work on it there and supervise the carpet people.

He ordered a car and driver from motor pool, a headache had taken up residence just behind his eyes and the thought of facing the subway and it’s crowds of civilians who had no concept of personal space, was just too much.  The Junior Agent driving was blessedly silent on the drive, weaving competently through traffic without muttering as much as an expletive when a cab aggressively cut him off.

“Agent Warren will be down in a minute.” Phil got out of the car and strode purposefully through the door. He wanted to slump, let his shoulders and back relax from their parade perfect posture, but the Junior was watching and until he was safely in his own space, he would never show that much weakness, even to people he worked with.

The chance to relax wasn’t going to come any time soon unfortunately, his apartment was bursting with people. Or that’s how it felt compared to the usual emptiness. He was able to dispatch Agent Warren quickly after exchanging a short all ok with him. The carpet people were making good progress. In the half a day he had been gone, they had removed the old carpet and underlay, exposing the floorboards and were almost done with removing the old nails.

The afternoon trickled passed in stops and starts of the tradesmen laughing and scraping and pounding as Phil tried to get some work done. He had underestimated the impact being surrounded by strangers would have on his productivity. By the time he waved them out of the door for the day, he was only a third of the way through the information he had brought home, and his headache had spread into a tight ache in his shoulders and neck.

Locking the door behind the last man, Phil sighed in relief. Putting that barrier between himself and the outside world instantly did wonders for his blood pressure. Turning on the security system helped even more.

Tugging his tie off, he wandered back through his space. The kettle was full and just waiting to be turned on, a pot of chamomile tea was his next tried and true method of winding down after a long day. The soothing scent reminded him of sitting in the kitchen with Maria, their housekeeper when he was growing up, and helping her peel potatoes or chop spring onions as he told her about his day. The warm taste transported him back to frozen winter days spent curled up with a book next to a raging fire. It was the indicator of the good things from his childhood, the people and moments he  _ didn’t _ want to forget even as everything else from that time was a blur of ridicule and loneliness. 

With the tea steeping, he shuffled into the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt as he went. Through the bare bedroom into the bathroom he went. He dropped the business shirt and his undershirt into the hamper, his pants quickly followed. A quick shower washed away a little bit more stress from the day. Stepping into the waiting soft sweatpants and t-shirt, he finally felt like he fit in his own skin again, the headache pushed back a little and like he could take his first full breath of the day.

The sight of the torn up bedroom was depressing. It was a striped back, bare wooden box, that was too close in looks to a coffin for Phil’s comfort especially with how dangerous his job is. His steps quickened to get through the room. With no furniture in his bedroom he was going to end up on the couch for the night and he wasn’t going to linger in the depressing space.

The smell of the chamomile tea was just tickling his nose when a burning pain burst across his back. He twisted awkwardly on the rough floor, ducking down as he went. A second searing pain sliced across the top of his arm, if he hadn’t turned it would have been a stab into his kidney.

The man who had attacked him was moving even as the second stab missed. He had a knife in each hand that were already dripping with Phil’s blood. Oddly a part of his mind was just thankful that his new carpet hadn’t gone in yet. Having it bloodstained less than 24 hours after going it would have been too much. The rest of his brain had shutdown, allowing for muscle memory and instinct to lead his actions. Ducking and twisting around the blades that were out to take his life.

Another line of fire on his abdomen as the shorter, muscle bound assassin got inside his guard for a second.  Grabbing hold of the other man’s arm he was able to twist inside his reach and wrench one of the knives away, evening the playing field. Having missed his first shot at subduing Phil, he was struggling to get a killing blow. Unused to fighting someone who knew how to fight back, he was flagging quickly.

A strong, bloodstained hand wrapped into the jersey of his t-shirt. He pulled them in close to each other, too close to be able to block or dodge a strike. The man’s blade slid in deep between two of Phil’s ribs, stealing his breath. Body to body, Phil was able to land the final hit, his stolen knife went up over the other man’s shoulder and into the base of his neck. Instantly, Phil found himself holding up the dead weight of a muscle bound corpse. His knife had hit true.

Phil let him crumple to the ground. Pressing a hand to his side where the second knife was still wedged between his ribs, he stumbled out of the bedroom and into the main room. Hitting the emergency button on his phone, he finally let himself collapse. Woozy from blood loss and the adrenaline crash, he sat on the floor and tried to breath through it.


	13. Chapter 13

The soft snow fell away from beneath his feet. Clint knew that he was risking a broken neck almost running down the steep, snow and ice covered slope, but with the sun rising behind him the chance of being seen was growing with every second. It had taken him hours that morning to get to his nest, if it took that long to get back to the car, he would be dead. 

Every crack of a rock falling down the hills around him, had him jumping, startled, and looking for a threat. Each time there wasn’t solid ground under the snow and the bottom fell out of his stomach, his circus training was the only thing that saved him. It made him appreciate why no one else had every been able to take Tang out, the environment around the Underground King was just as likely to take out any threat as his bodyguards or the man himself.

Stumbling back into the driver’s seat of his car, still mummified in layers of cold weather gear, he couldn’t convince his heart rate that he was safe. The pounding of his heart in his ears almost enough to drown out the rumble of the engine coming to life under his feet. He had sweated through the first two layers of his clothes within minutes, the engine pumping out heat as he pushed the machine to its limits and his nerves kept his temperature too high in the small cabin. He didn’t stop to take off a few layers. Instead continuing to push through. 

The white and grey landscape merged into one continuous stream of static. Rather than going downhill, back the way he had come, he sped further into the mountains. Tang wouldn’t keep all of his people close, he would have people in the local settlements. Clint couldn’t predict how they would react to losing their boss and preferred to avoid them all together. He did know two things though, that the Chinese border wasn’t far away and he was working under his own steam again. The compulsion to head into Kyrgyzstan was gone. The only thing he regretted about that, was not having a clear idea of what his next step was. He would have liked whoever put him in a deadly situation also gave him a way out of it.

Fighting the car across the increasingly treacherous landscape, his sharp eyes missed the white clad figure buried in the snow, the ray of sunlight bouncing off the glass goggles going unnoticed. He didn’t miss the second one. Rounding a ridge line, a smudge in the snow that was the wrong grey stood out to Clint. He was being watched. Wrestling the car past, the person made no move to expose themselves or follow him. They either didn’t know what he had done, a distinct possibility in the remote region they were working in where reception was spotty at best and there was no line of sight for more traditional communication methods, or they were waiting to ambush him somewhere further down. He gave better odds to the latter. Why post sentries that you couldn’t communication with?

He passed another three almost hidden watchers without any reaction from them. He had to be close to the border, not that that meant much out here, but it would start the downhill climb and put him that much closer to being clear of Tang’s immediate sphere of influence. The front of the car was just starting to tip down for the first time all day, when a shot rang out across the silent mountains. Clint lost control of the car as the front wheel blew and the steering wheel jerked.

The shot had been timed perfectly. The free-wheeling vehicle twisted across the ice and into an outcropping of rocks that was too much, even for the off-roader, to handle. As Clint was juddering to a violent halt, the wide valley was suddenly swarming with white-clad people. Even moving anyone other than Clint would have been hard pressed to see them. They used the landscape and dull cloud obscured sunlight to blend into the snow and rocks. 

They were on him before he could detangle himself from the crushed metal that had been his car, the layers of clothing making it harder to manoeuvre in the small space. Falling out onto the snow, the dark barrels of three AKs were pointed at his head.

“Jildiruu mümkün emes!”

“Ne dvigaysya!”

“Bié dòng!”

Each of the men holding a weapon on him shouted at the same time. Of the languages, he recognised Chinese and Russian and knew they were all telling him not to move. As he lay, motionless, in the snow, the cold creeping between his layers, two of the group broke off and began ransacking his car. The bow case went flying to the ground, the impact jarring it open to show nothing but a stretched bowstring and an empty quiver.

With the car empty, they turned their attention to him. The three barrels not wavering as the other two advanced on him. With rough but efficient movements, they stripped him down to his boxers. The four pistols, three knives and garrotte he had had squirrelled away in his clothes disappeared into his ambushers layers as quickly as they had uncovered them. 

Stripped and shivering in the frigid mountain air, all he could do was wait for a bullet to the brain. He didn’t want to die, but he wasn’t surprise this is what it had come to. Growing old had never been an option for him. 

The bullet never came. Instead, his arms were wrenched behind him and wrapped in fabric from his wrists to his elbows, binding him tightly. Too tightly for him to have any hope of escaping. With his arms under control, they pulled him to his feet and hobbled him. Course rope stretched between his ankles stopped him from being able to walk in anything more than a shuffle.

From the snow they dragged him into the blacked out back of a tracked truck. Two of the gun toting thugs followed him in, sitting between him and freedom. They ignored him and each other, their focus on the blacked out windows of the vehicle. Clint figured they thought he wasn’t alone and were waiting for his partner or team to mount a rescue. They were going to be waiting a long time. Clint figured Natasha might spare him a thought in a year or two when they didn’t cross paths on a job, but other than that no one would notice his disappearance. It would be sad, except that had been what he was going for six months ago, that anybody who would care one way or another about his continued existence would think he was dead.

Bound and dumped on the bare metal, there was nothing for him to brace himself against. He spent the hours going back along the winding river valleys that he had fled down, being slammed against the walls every time they went over a bump a little too hard. If he slid too close to his guards, they kicked him back into the depths of the box. When they heaved him out into the bruised purple light of the early winter dusk, his skin was blooming with angry bruises on the skin left bare by their strip search and blue was creeping into his fingernails and lips from the cold.

The square in the middle of the little hamlet spread in front of them. The pavement scraped clear of snow and ice. Groups of people were clustered around the area, some standing and talking as any other group of people on any other street corner anywhere in the world, others weren’t as innocuous. Weapons hung off the shoulders or waists of over half of the people Clint could see and there was more than one group practicing hand-to-hand or weapons. The two guards had been re-joined by two of the others from the mountain and two more that Clint hadn’t seen before but figured were the second-in-commands, their clothes made from better materials than anyone else’s and the swords on theirs belts better looked after, more ceremonial than practical. The violence hardened eyes that glared down at him from their dark faces said not to underestimate them, even without practical weapons they were capable of breaking someone completely.

“Bul birir bolup sanalat.” The man on the left said.

The two new faces turn sharply, heading towards one of the smaller buildings. The guards who had ridden in the back, grabbed him under each arm and hauled him upright, dragging him in the other men’s wakes. The last two of the group were at Clint’s back and although he couldn’t see them, he was sure they had their weapons pointed at him.

The inside of the brutalist, concrete building isn’t any warmer than outside. His breath still condensed on every exhale and his fingers had stopped tingling from cold.

His guards followed the 2ICs through a single short corridor and then into a bare concrete room that was indistinguishable from the rest of the building with the exception of the rust like stains on the floor and walls. Clint recognised the dried blood. It had been put down in layers over a long time. The 2IC, Clint dubbed him Toothy, flicked a finger at the single metal ring bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. Clint’s guards dropped him next to it and attached him to it, the lines tight enough the he couldn’t sit up from the hunched crouch they had dropped him in. He had the option of staying in the position he was in which would get tired fast, kneeling which felt a smidge too subservient for him, or sitting on the blood soaked floor with his legs awkwardly to one side. 

He went for the third option, settling himself with a rattle of his newly acquired chains. For most people they would have a hard time scrambling up from the awkward position, but the acrobats and contortionists at Carson’s a had taught him a lot and he had maintained the stringent strength and stretch training that they needed to do their job. The confusion in their eyes was enough to make up for the awkward position that was pulling at the bullet wound from Chicago.

“Who do you work for?” Toothy asked in a thick Russian accent. He would have understood him better if he had just spoken Russian. Not that he was going to tell him that, play the American yokel that only knew English. 

“Hu?” He asked, pretending he hadn’t understood what he had been asked.

They didn’t ask again, going straight for the physical incentive to listen better. A heavy fist landed on his right temple, snapping his head to the side. The hit set up a steady thumping in his head. That had done some damage.

“Who. Do. You. Work for?” Toothy over enunciated his words. Admittedly, it was clearer.

“No one.” Clint bluffed, loosening his muscles in preparation for the hit.

It came quickly, a kick to just below his left hip joint. The hard toe of the boot dug into the muscle, pinching it against the bone. Numbness spread through the whole limb. He wouldn’t be walking on that any time soon.

A knife appeared.

“Who do you work for?”

“Our lord and saviour Jesus Christ.”

The knife sliced into the flesh just above his right elbow. They had been aiming for the joint itself but their aim was shit. Which he told them. They tried again on his left, with only marginally better success.

“Who do you work for?” It sounded almost bored this time.

“No one. Dipshit.” Clint spat at them. As fun as it was to taunt them, he would hopefully need his arms in the future and the natural progression would be his shoulders. Why hadn’t they started with his knees like any normal torturer?

They must have believed him that time, because they moved on. For hours, they asked question after question. Hitting or kicking or cutting into him each time they didn’t believe his answer, or he didn’t answer quickly enough, or just because they could. The grins on the two thugs faces who were doing the physical work, was sickening. The fuckers were getting off on hurting him.

They only stopped when he couldn’t answer their questions any more. Coughing blood and throat raw from screaming, they left him on the cold concrete. He knew they didn’t care if he survived the night. Curled up on the floor, where he had been for hours trying to protect his head and torso, he didn’t bother trying to move. The cold floor seeping the last of his energy from his body.

A woman tutting above him startled him, but between the cold and blood loss, turning his head up to look at the person who he hadn’t heard enter was all he could do. One of his eyes was swollen shut and the other was seeing double. Even so, he recognised the woman standing above him, it was the old lady from Lianyungang.

“This won’t do.” She muttered, tapping her cane against the floor as she thought. The wood slightly muffled by the pool of Clint’s blood that she was standing in, not that she had noticed.

The muffled tapping quickly shredded Clint’s last frayed nerve. Feebly trying to kick out to stop the noise, his leg barely twitched. He then tried to tell her to shut up, but it came out as a gurgling groan. One of the last hits had broken a couple of ribs and from the increasing struggle to pull in air, it had probably punctured a lung.

“Shì de, shì lěngjìng xiàlái.” She tapped her way in a circuit around the room. Taking stock of his injuries but poking at random points on the wall and floor. “Boston I think. If you are so determined to die for him, he can make sure you don’t.” She announced cryptically once she was standing beside his head again.

She lightly hit the end of her cane against the centre of his forehead once. Instead of the pain he was expecting, a warm glow began where the wood made contact with his skin. Quickly, it spread out through his body. Racing down his face, into his neck. It spread like liquid gold through his chest and into his arms. Within three laboured breaths every inch of his body was tingling with warmth.

“Hǎo.” She tapped him again and his mind finally slid into the welcoming black arms of oblivion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the one.
> 
> Yes, yes calm down.
> 
> Good


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phil heads home to recuperate, the present under the christmas tree wasn’t quite what he was expecting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One quick note:  
> I am not Catholic. I have been to a Midnight Mass once, when I was six and I remember nothing about it except that it was cold. So, if there is something wrong, please forgive it.  
> Otherwise, enjoy.

The steady beep of a heart monitor greeted Phil when he blinked back into consciousness. He couldn’t keep hold of a thought except for drugged annoyance at the sound that seemed to drive needle deeper into his brain each time it echoed in the room. Groaning, he squeezed his eyes shut again. Opening them hurt and the edges of his vision swam, double the nausea that was already sitting low in his gut.

“Morning Cheese.” Fury’s voice boomed from beside him. The dual edged sword of amusement and concern wielded perfectly in his old friend’s voice.

“I hate you.” Phil rasped, throat raw from intubation. How long had he been asleep?

“Two days. Almost bled out before they got to you.” Fury sobered quickly. Answering the question Phil hadn’t realised he had asked aloud.

The door into the room creaked open. The soft scuff of someone entering the room stopped Fury from saying anything else. He opened one eye a slit, just enough to confirm that is was John, his preferred nurse, who had entered. Seeing the jet black hair and pale skin of the competent young man, he allowed his eye to shut again. 

“The assassin was Georges Batroc, French National. AWOL from the French Army five years ago, then spent some time as a mercenary for various despotic regimes in Africa and Asia. Graduated to part-time hitman about a year ago.” Fury briefed him as John did his work. “Interpol and FBI thank you for removing him.” The amusement heavy in his voice reiterated Fury’s disdain for the two investigative agencies. “This plan of yours isn’t working Phil.” Fury sighed, finally getting around to what he was there to say. “None of them know who wants you dead, the only archer you found thinks Hawkeye is dead, and now you are going to be out of commission for weeks.” Fury grumbled, as unhappy to lose Coulson in the field for even longer than the lack of movement in the op.

Phil morosely nodded in understanding, he was going to have to come up with something else.

But Fury wasn’t done. “You’re going back to Boston to heal.”

“Wait. What? No. I’m staying in New York. I can do deskwork while I heal.” Phil yelped. There was no way he was going home!

“It’s almost Christmas Cheese. Go home. Get better. Sitwell can take over the investigation.” Fury swept out of the room before Phil could lodge further protest.

= + =

Phil carefully inched himself out of the back of the cab and upright. The internal stitches pulled unpleasantly when he moved at anything faster than snails pace. The careful maneuvering was made even more nerve wracking by his father’s cool disapproval from the door of the family home that Phil hadn’t seen since his mom’s funeral almost a year ago.

The older man didn’t dein to come down and help Phil with his suitcase or garment bag, just watched as the cab driver took pity on the pale, obviously unwell man and got out to help. Thanking him, Phil doubled the fare as a tip, getting an astonished but heartfelt thanks in return.

“Phillip.” His dad’s voice was as cold as his eyes. Unimpressed that a ‘random mugging’ was the only reason Phil was returning for the holiday season.

“Father. How are you?” Phil stopped in the doorway and returned the cold greeting.

“Well. You?” James turned and walked further into the large house, pretending indifference to the answer. Or maybe it wasn’t pretend. There was a good chance the man was indifferent to Phil having almost died.

“Coming along.” He answered noncommittally.

By unspoken agreement, they left conversation there. James disappeared into his office, door firmly shut behind him. It was the strongest memory Phil had of his father from childhood, his back vanishing behind the thick wood. Long since haven gotten over that piece of familial neglect, Phil slowly made his way deeper into the house and crept up the stairs to his childhood bedroom.

Every public space of the house was decked out in impeccable christmas decorations. Tasteful wreaths on every light fitting, understated tinsel wound up the bannister, and gold ornaments in every window. The private spaces were a stark contrast, not a single object suggested it was december.

He had to put down his bags to open the door into his bedroom, unable to do both with his injuries. Stepping into the room that had been his sanctuary for eighteen years, he found it untouched since he had walked out the door to report for basic training. Cool blues and muted reds dominated, with the only touch of personality the captain america memorabilia that still littered the space. His lungs eased with the false security of a closed door between himself and the rest of the household.

Moving his bags to the dresser he left them sitting unopened in front of the heavy piece of furniture. Exhausted from the trip, as short as it had been, he collapsed on the bed. The only allowance for comfort he made was toeing off his shoes and then the injured man was asleep.

A soft knock on the bedroom door woke him hours later. Dull evening light filtered around and under the thin curtains on the windows. His internal clock told him it was just before six in the evening, dinner time in the Collidge household. If you were in the house and could stand on two legs, not matter how precariously, you were expected to be in the dining room at six on the dot.

Moving at a fraction of his speed, there was no way he was going to get downstairs in time. At the top of the stairs he stopped as something occurred to him. He was an ex-Army Ranger, current Senior SHIELD Agent and right-hand man of the Director of a Global intelligence agency, why was the thought of being late to dinner with the father who hadn’t approved of him in over fifteen years making him feel like a teenager again? He knew it was more than just being back in this house, but wasn’t sure what was behind the feeling. What he did know, was that it was bullshit. Starting down the stairs, he moved at the speed that was comfortable for him and his injuries, not the speed that would maybe get him there in time.

It was a liberating decision.

Shambling into the overly gothic dining room with its twelve seater table with only two places set, his father was already seated at the head of the table, glower on his face. Phil wondered why they were bothering. His pain meds were making food an unattractive option and if he wasn’t here he knew his father would have eaten shut up in his office. But. It was How Things Were Done.

Even under his father’s eye, he didn’t move any faster. He didn’t want to be here anymore than he was wanted. Eventually, he reached the place set for him. Three forks, three knives, a spoon, and a fucking  _ oyster fork _ were set out precisely. Each utensil was exactly parallel and evenly spaced. Phil wondered how many times the kitchen maid had to re-do it before Mrs Oliver, their Housekeeper who had worked for them longer than Phil had been alive, was satisfied.

Sitting down, it seemed to him as if every joint in his body was creaking. He felt every year as an extra weight pulling him down. Intellectually he knew it was the injury and the drugs, but that didn’t change how painful the next few hours were going to be.

“You’re late.” James said, voice almost as crisp as the cloth fabric he was snapping cross his lap at the same time.

“Yes.” Phil agreed. He wasn’t going to apologise and he wasn’t going to make excuses.

They lapsed into silence. The only sound was the creaks and groans of an old house settling into the cold of night, and the far off murmur of voices behind the door that lead to the kitchen. Uncomfortable silence stretched.

Well-oiled hinges slid open soundlessly. A young woman Phil hadn’t met, but could recite the life history of after running her background check when she joined the household, came through the door carefully. Silver tray with a covered dish sitting in the centre in her hands.

Course after course passed in the same manner. Claustrophobic silence broken by shards of bitter questions, each of them a dig at Phil’s career, a cover, or lack of relationship, which even if he was seeing someone his father would just use that as a barb, and the comparative success of his siblings’ lives.

Phil made his slow escape at the first possible moment, pleading fatigue from injury and travel he turned down the after dessert coffee and limped from the room, muscles seized after long hours in a draft room sitting in an uncomfortable antique chair.

= + =

The next week passed in a slow motion blur. He listened to his father rumble out of the garage in one of his overpriced sedans before daybreak. Only once the house was clear of family did he leave his room. He wasn’t hiding he assured himself, he just didn’t have the energy to deal with the judgement that early in the morning. From there he spent his days reading books that had been gathering dust on his bedside table since his last medically mandated leave three years ago, or people watching in various cafes downtown. It was relaxing, it also made his skin itch with inactivity and boredom.

Inching slowly closer to Christmas and with no evidence of Jasper pulling off a miracle and getting him the hell out of Boston before the holiday, on the 23 rd he bit the bullet and went present shopping. He quickly picked up something for each of the house staff. Mrs Oliver was getting a subscription to a Mystery Book club who would send her a new pulp mystery each month. Lindsey Walsh, the kitchen maid, was getting a set of nail polishes the woman in the shop recommended. Javier, the gardener/ handyman got his normal bottle of whiskey.

The family was more difficult. His father was impossible to buy for, but Phil also knew even if his gift was the most heartfelt present there would still be something wrong with it. A set of cuff-links caught his eye in one of the jewellery stores he had wandered past three times already, that would do.

For hours he shuffled between boutiques and department stores, picking up bits and pieces as he went. In Nordstrom he had to stop himself from getting his sister-in-law a suitcase specially designed for wine. Fiona had always enjoyed getting in on the family disdain for Phil and his choices, and she had had a problem with alcohol that Wasn’t Talked About since he had known her. By the skin of his teeth he put it back and picked her out a silk scarf and set of diamond studs that she would never wear because they were from him.

In the early dusk, he clambered back into a taxi and tried to unlock the muscles of his back that had locked up over the long day. A headache pounded at his temples from the crowds and his own stubborn refusal to take his painkillers while he was going to be around strangers. Even through the pain, a pervasive sense of accomplishment under pinned it.

The daytime of the 24 th was spent in drifts of red, green and gold wrapping paper and tissue. As day slipped into night, he took his OCD wrapped presents down to put under the professionally designed Christmas tree. His father was still hidden away in his office and wouldn’t emerge until the second they had to leave. Megan, his youngest sister, was waiting in the foyer cell phone in hand as she typed furiously. She had arrived from New York that afternoon and would probably be on a flight back by midday the next day, apparently the Stock Market didn’t take major public holidays off.

“Megan.” He greeted, she had still been working when she arrived and he had left her to it.

“Phillip.” She nodded at him but continued typing.

He didn’t take it personally, of his three siblings he got on with her the best and they shared their commitment to their work. Eventually she must have finished whatever she was working on because the phone disappeared into a pocket on her jacket. He knew it would reappear soon, but that was ok.

“How are you doing?” She asked, carefully hugging him.

He tilted a hand back and forth after accepting the hug. “Getting there. Still a bit sore.”

“I bet.” She laughed humourlessly. Of everyone in the family, she was the only one who knew how serious the injuries had been, because she had asked. “Sorry you have to put up with the family.”

“At least I get to see you.” He hugged her around the shoulders but the moment was interrupted by the ping of her phone. There were too many years and too many secrets between them for them ever to be close, but they got along well enough.

“Sorry.” She muttered as she fished it out.

He waved away the apology, if work was calling him he would be answering just as quickly.

When their father joined them, right on time Phil thought covertly checking his watch, Megan’s phone disappeared again. Christmas Eve Mass was sacred and the only time in the year when family actually came first.

The three of them slid into the car waiting for them. Megan watching carefully as Phil got in, making sure he was actually as sort of ok as he said he was.  He shot her an eyebrow in response, a silent ‘do I pass inspection?’. Her smirk said he did.

The drive to the church was only five minutes but there was a wait as other cars disgorged their passengers ahead of them. Fifteen minutes of crawling later the car finally stopped directly at the bottom of the wide stone stairs.

Once inside they found Alan, their brother who was between Phil and Megan in age, with Fiona and their daughter Claire. The three of them must have only just arrived because they had only just handed over their coats to the coat check and were still sorting themselves out. Clothes displaced by winter layers were being tugged back into place and hair smoothed from hats.

“Alan, Fiona!” James called out, his booming ‘public’ voice carrying over the hubbub of milling people.

“Father!” Alan called back once he turned at the sound of his name and spotted them in line to get rid of their own coats.

Unfortunately, Alan wasn’t the only person whose attention was caught. Heads throughout the room turned, which was the point. Close to the double height wooden doors one particular head turned that Phil could have done without.

A flash of silver-grey hair and a shark’s smile.

“Phil!” Blake cut a swathe through the crowd, people hurriedly sidestepping to clear room for him.

Phil grit his teeth and greeted the other agent. He should have realised that the other man would be there he didn’t have the same problems relating to his family that Phil did. Blake, or Brady here, had gone with a more impressive cover than Phil’s mid-level accountant, his family believed his was a partner at an exclusive Hedge Fund.

“I didn’t think you were coming back for Christmas?” His smile, already predatory, took on a nasty edge.

“I had to take some unexpected leave.” Phil answered blandly.

Alan watched the interaction with interest, inserting himself at the first opportunity. “Obviously your work doesn’t need you as much as you say, Phil, if they send you home after a having your bag snatched.” There was a little brother’s prickly glee at poking at an older sibling poorly hidden in his voice. “I wouldn’t think you two would run in the same circles in the Big Apple.” He turned to Blake, Felix Phil reminded himself, for an explanation.

“Our satellite office shares a block with Phil’s, accounting wasn’t it, office. I see him around occasionally.” Felix shrugged it off.

Mentally, Phil checkout of the conservation. He still answered when he was addressed and gave the correct yes and no’s without too much input from his brain, allowing him the freedom to observe the people around them.

Kaitlyn, her husband Matthew, and their two children entered as Alan and Felix were comparing golf scored. Or more accurately who they had been golfing with at the time. His older sister saw them, meeting his eye before quickly looking away, but made no effort to say hello. Phil didn’t care, she was almost as bad as their father.

The large doors opened, showing the candle lit, holly wreathed nave beyond. The crowd fell silent and flowed inside. People peeling off into their family pews. Phil continued up the aisle. The Collidge family pew was three quarters of the way up the building, only a few pews back from the alter. The placement was another display of their family’s ‘place’ in the community. 

Phil settled into the end of the pew closest to the wall, he was the first of the family to get there. Alan, Fiona and Claire right behind him. Rather than be pulled into conversation, he plucked the hymn book from the shelf in front. Absorbing himself in finding the correct hymns, he was able to ignore the rest of the family.

Father Patrick stepped up to the altar and started the service. It followed the same rhythm of every Midnight Mass, not that it was held at midnight, Phil had attended through his childhood. The choirs voice rose with the first hymn, breaking across the people and washing all other sound and through from room. Voices within the pews quickly stretched to meet them.

Quietly Phil joined in. HIs baritone an undertow to the higher notes of the choir. He had never been loud in his devotion, choosing to see God in the small kindnesses of people around him. Since he had come out, he had felt the disconnect from the faith of his family even more. Only going to church when he was in Boston during one of the Holy Days. 

Even so, the familiarity of the service was soothing and he was able to sink his mind into it. Letting the worries and pains fade in a way that he normally couldn’t. The soft opening of Angels We have Heard on High by a single soaring voice brought Phil back to the present. The hymn was the ending of Mass, freeing the congregation to face the light snowfall that had started.

The pews emptied from front back, those who could afford to sit in the prominent seats weren’t going to wait for everyone else to leave first. Their money bought them the privilege. The freshly fallen snow wasn’t as pristine as it should have been. A dark smudge was spread across the stairs halfway down. From his place behind his family, and they behind the Curley’s and Sullivan’s, Phil tried to figure out what was setting his alarms ringing. Mrs Sullivan, the Matriarch of that family who was 100 in she was a day, shrieked as the smudge moved.

It was a person. The people in front of him stumbled back, both from the shock of Mrs Sullivan’s scream and the low groan that the prone figure gave out. The opening allowed Phil, to slip closer. Blonde hair, darkened with melted snow and what looked like blood, was plastered close to the man’s skull. His skin was tinged blue from cold, which was unsurprising as he wasn’t wearing anything other than a pair of black briefs.

Closer still a frisson of recognition shivered down Phil’s spine. He had seen this man before. Kneeling, Phil turned him over with a light hand on a bruised but well muscled shoulder. The beaten face of the stranger from six months ago was looking up blankly from the stairs of his childhood church.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to be the final chapter of this story, but it was getting too long. So I split it into two. I should have the second half up within a week or so.

Desperately searching for a pulse, Phil found one. Slight fluttering of jugular under bruised skin assured him of life. Continued sluggish bleeding, and blue tinged lips and nailbeds suggested that might not last long if something wasn’t done. Quickly, he shrugged out of his coat. In normal condition, he would have easily lifted the denser man to slide the body warmed fabric under him, but with his own injuries not even half healed, he would do more damage to both of them if he tried.

“Dad. Alan. Get over here and help.” He allowed some of Senior Agent Coulson out. 

The shock of command getting the other two men moving. Once close enough, their medical training kicked in, even though neither of them were trauma surgeons or ER doctors they could still help.

“Megan call an ambulance.” 

“Phil is that…” Felix had pushed through the thickening crowd, half recognising the man from Phil’s description six months ago.

“Yes. Call Sitwell.” He broke in. Hopefully he could get out of this without his life in New York crashing into his one here.

“Right.” Felix stepped away the make the call, his own situational awareness finally taking over from his own shock of the intersection.

Things moved quickly them. Without even a rudimentary first-aid kit, James and Alan weren’t able to do much more than bundle the unconscious man up in coats and wrap scarves around the worst of the bleeding. As they were tightening the last scarf, a bright pink wool monstrosity a little girl had donated to the cause, the ambulance screeched to a stop. Red and blue lights illuminating the street. Flashing off car windows and bouncing through falling snow.

The paramedics in navy blue parkas and thick cargo pants that reminded Phil of the clothes SHIELD specialists wear into the field for cold weather ops, came hurtling out of the boxy vehicle as soon as it pulled to a stop. Slipping slightly on the accumulating snow, they caught themselves and dropped down beside the stranger. 

Rather than unwrap the scarves and jackets, they checked the man’s pulse, and eyes, and pain response. Then splits and drips and wires leading to monitoring equipment Phil recognised as well as his Doctor family members did from his own experiences using and having them used on him. The speed with which they bundled him onto a backboard and into the back of the ambulance was reassuring and worrying in equal measure. The level of professionalism was reassuring, but the concerned looks passed between them and the sheer volume of equipment they were using suggest serious injury.

Phil followed them into the back of the van. Stopping Alan from climbing in and trying to play the hero. He excused it to the paramedics as knowing the guy, they didn’t care, more interested in getting to the closest hospital.

With a purring roar, the ambulance pulled away from the crowd. Even with the streets practically deserted, the drive was still slower than Phil would have liked, snow laying an inch deep on the road. Lights flashing and siren wailing in the still night, they hurried along and then over the frozen river. The red stone and glass facade of the emergency department at St Elizabeth’s loomed out of the thickening snowfall. Screeching to a stop in the salted ambulance bay, a small throng of doctors and nurses were already waiting. Throwing open the back door, the paramedic who had ridden in the back with Phil and the stranger, pulled the gurney out and began both the informational and physical handover. Phil followed in their wake. Feeling superfluous all he could do would listen to the rapid fire exchange. If this had been at SHIELD he could have demanded information. He was known and respected there. Here he was just a two-bit accountant who didn’t really have anything useful to add.

One of the nurses split away from the herd when they spotted Phil trailing them.

“I’m sorry sir, you can’t go in there.” She stepped directly in his path, so close that if he didn’t stop he would walk into her. “You came in with him?”

“Yes.” He answered the rhetorical question.

“Can you tell me his name?” She whipped out a tablet, fingers poised to enter the information.

“No.”

The fingers dropped a bit. “Can you tell me anything?”

Phil could tell her all sorts of things. That the man had been injured before and they should watch out for a violent reaction when he woke up, if he woke up. He could tell her that his blood type was A negative and as of six months ago he was clear of all diseases, but had previously been exposed to chickenpox, measles, malaria, and the plague because apparently that was still a thing. He couldn’t tell her how he knew all of those things though and therein lay a huge fucking problem.

“No.” He lied.

“Ok.” She left him there, standing in the middle of the emergency room the sounds of everyday human suffering filling the air. It was too much. His own injury, returning home, and now the reappearance of someone he thought he would never see again. He felt himself sway.

“Are you ok sir?” A different nurse asked from behind the sign in desk.

“Yes. Ah, is there is where I can wait?” He half-heartedly waved towards the curtains that cut off his view.

“There’s a waiting room just over there.” The nurse, Benny his nametag said, pointed to Phil’s right. “But if you aren’t family they won’t be able to tell you anything.

Phil ignored that, going to find somewhere to sit. They may not be able to tell him anything yet, but once Sitwell got here that would quickly change. Only five minutes after arriving, the curtain was wrenched back and the gurney was whiskey out of the E.D., watching the numbers on the elevator and checking the floor against the hospital directory, Phil knew they had taken the stranger to surgery. The grim looks on the faces of the people who had taken him away wasn’t reassuring.

He returned to the uncomfortable moulded plastic chair to wait.

= + =

“Phil.” Alan’s voice unexpectedly cut through the noise of the emergency department.

With a bone deep sigh, Phil stood to greet him. The presence of two uniformed officers following him was even more surprising. “Alan.” There wasn’t really anything else he felt the need to say.

“Good Evening Mr Collidge. I’m Officer Rhodes and this is Officer Manning. You were at the Church earlier this evening?” The taller of the two men asked.

“Yes Officer. For the Midnight Mass with my family.” Phil answered. How long could he go without lying or refusing to answer one of their questions, he wondered. He didn’t think it would be very long.

“Can you walk us through what happened.” It wasn’t a request.

“Of course. We were leaving the church when Mrs Sullivan, who was ahead of us screamed.” He began, walking through the night quickly while leaving out the most important things.

As he talked Manning jotted notes in a small notebook and Rhodes watched him closely. It was a well-oiled routine of getting the most important information down accurately and quickly while also watching the person they were questioning for signs of lie. They had probably been working together for a while.

“Your brother mentioned you said you knew the man?” Manning looked up from his notebook.

The sly look on Alan’s face told Phil all he needed to know about why Alan had mentioned that. He had spotted something in Phil’s demeanour and was hoping to catch him out, in what exactly Phil wasn’t sure but it didn’t matter.

“Yes.” Phil agreed blandly.

“Yes, you said that. Or yes, you know him?” Rhodes asked, eyes hardening with the thought Phil was trying to talk around them.

“Yes to both.” Phil knew he was going to have to explain but he wasn’t sure how. “I met him once about six months ago in New York.”

“And you recognised him?” Rhodes sounded doubtful which Phil could understand. The man’s face was black and blue, swollen and blood splattered. If Phil hadn’t already seen him like that, he probably wouldn’t have recognised him. Or at least a normal person wouldn’t have. 

Phil carefully picked his words. “He wasn’t in the, ah, best of shape than either.” Ie bleeding into Phil’s carpet.

“Do you make a habit of being around beaten people?” Suspicion was clear in Rhodes’ voice now. He wasn’t buying Phil’s story.

“Not since I was in the Army.” Up till this point, Phil hadn’t lied. He was about to start. “I saw him get hit by a car in New York.”

“And will a police report in the City back that up?” Rhodes almost sneered, not believing it.

Phil was normally better at this, but the shock of the man showing up out of nowhere had scrambled him more than he wanted to admit.

“Of course.” He lied. If they checked now, there wouldn’t be anything but a quick phone call to HQ once he was alone would have them slipping something into the system. A cold case hit and run probably. 

“Mr Collidge?” A young voice called out.

“Yes?” Phil and Alan answered together.

“Oh, um. Phil?” A tiny, mousy haired woman was watching the quartet.

“Yes?” Phil said again.

“Hello sir. Ah, May I speak with you?” Her Britch accent was light, softened by an extended period living in the US. She had two lanyards hanging off her jacket, one was a Visiting Medical Personnel badge from Harvard Medical School and the other was a nothing building pass, only the small embossed bird on one corner telling Phil she was actually a SHIELD researcher.

“Excuse me.” Phil walked away without waiting for permission. There wasn’t anything else he was willing to tell them. He led her into a side hallway.

“My name is Doctor Simmons. I was in the area and Agent Sitwell asked me to come.” She introduced herself.

“Thank you. Please call me Phil here.”

Her face contorted slightly at his request, the idea of calling a Senior Agent by their first name not sitting right with her.

“Think of it like we are undercover.” He suggested, though he didn’t think she had any experience in the area. “Have you been able to find anything out?” He moved them along before she could actually protest.

“They have taken him into surgery to stabilise a broken leg. He also has two broken ribs, a pulmonary contusion, concussion, and various cuts and bruises. His body temperature was also dangerously low, they are treating him for that and for blood loss. But he will probably face multiple complications. There is also a bullet wound from about two weeks ago that was stitched up but not by a medical professional.” She rattled off from memory.

He was impressed with the amount of information she had been able to get. How she got so much, so quickly was the question. A single raised eyebrow of enquiry had her blushing.

“I, um, told them I was his doctor and friend. He had been able to call before passing out in front you’re the church. I provided them with a digital medical file. Agent Sitwell sent it through with a cover story. Mr Don Baker.” She babbled.

“Mr Collidge?” Rhodes had lost patience with Phil, wanting to get the interview done so he could get back to the station before the snowfall got any heavier.

“Of course. Sorry.” He led Simmons back into the main waiting room. “I don’t think there is anything else I can tell you.”

“And you Dr Simmons? Can you tell us anything?” He squinted slightly to be able to read her name tag.

“Oh, yes.” She smiled brightly at him. “His name is Don Baker.” She launched into her own set of lies.

Listening to her, Phil’s opinion of her ability to obfuscate increased tenfold. Face with someone outside her chain of command, she performed spectacularly. Her sparkling smile and babbling voice suggested innocent and she exuded an aura of believability that even the suspicious Officer Rhodes was spellbound by.

After a serious of follow up questions, mostly to Simmons, but a few to Phil. The two officers left. During the interview, Alan had drifted into the background. Phil’s success at not incriminating himself in whatever malfeasance he had imagined had left Alan scowling in the corner.

“Phil we are expected at home.” Alan slithered back into Phil’s active awareness once the police were out of sight. “We can leave Mr Baker to his, friend.” His eyes glanced over Simmons, dismissing her as anyone important.

Phil didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay and find out who the stranger was, why he had tumbled into Phil’s path beaten and bleeding twice in six months. He also dreaded going home and being confronted with the leery eyes of his family.

He had no excuse to stay.

“Can you please keep me informed?” He jotted his personal phone number down and held it out to her on the back of the church order of service. The Mass feeling like it was days ago not an hour at most.

“Absolutely. Merry Christmas.”

They left her standing in the middle of the waiting room.

= + =

The taxi ride home was silent. After giving the address to the driver, the two brothers didn’t utter another sound until Phil was tipping the driver.

“So, who is he really?” Alan asked snidely. 

Phil tried to walk past, he was tired and overdue for his pain meds. A hand snaked out and grabbed him, roughly pulling him to a stop. The move pulled at half healed stitches. Biting his tongue and breathing as deeply as he could was the only thing that stopped Phil from swearing at the sharp stab of pain.

“Let go Alan.” He didn’t quite manage to keep the threat out of his voice.

“Or what?”

Done with his family, he grabbed his brother’s little finger where it was gripping just above his elbow and wrenched it backwards. Alan had to let his hand follow or risk having his finger broken. Letting go, he walked away. Alan clutching his abused hand stayed where he was. Blowing through the front door, or at least shambling through it with purpose, he bypassed the formal lounge room where the rest of the family was arrayed. Ignoring the imperious call from his father, he made his way upstairs. Shutting his bedroom door between himself and the world, he had to stop and breathe trying to get his roiling emotions under control.

Giving it up as a lost cause, the anger boiling in his gut wasn’t going away any time soon, he changed into his sleep pants and a t-shirt, grabbed his laptop and got into bed. A few hours of mind numbing paperwork and his pain meds should allow him to sleep.

= + =

It was mid-morning when he woke up with a groan. Sunlight burning through his eyelids from where he had forgotten to close the curtains the night before. He tried to turn over, away from the light. A painful stabbing sensation told him that wasn’t going to happen until he took his next round of meds and that was probably what had woken him in the first place.

Buzzing on the bedside table interrupted the argument he was having with himself about whether getting up was worth the trouble. Carefully reaching out a hand, he snagged his phone from where it was charging.

“’Llo?” He croaked, throat and mouth dry and objecting to making sound.

“Mr Collidge?” The unsure voice of Dr Simmons crept across the phone line.

Clearing his voice to sound more like himself, he answered. “Yes. One second.” He sat up carefully and wet his mouth and throat with the glass of water waiting to be used for that exact purpose. “What’s going on Dr Simmons?”

“They are going to start weaning him off the sedatives. I thought you might like to be here?” There was a question in there where there shouldn’t have been but the young woman didn’t know him. She might know the legends that circulated SHIELD, growing bigger each time, but she didn’t know  _ him. _

“Of course. Thank you. I’ll be there soon.” He hung up.

Forty-five minutes later, armoured in one of his suits and two fresh coffees in hand, he walked through the front doors of the hospital. A skeleton crew of staff for Christmas meant the large space was deserted, the front desk unmanned and no one to tell him where ‘Mr Baker’ was within the sprawling building. The emergency department was unlikely to tell him where to go, he still wasn’t family after all. Fishing out his phone from the left hand breast pocket of his jacket, he flicked through to return call.

Simmons answered after a ring and a half. “Sir?”

“Where in the Hospital should I be going?” If he had been thinking clearly, he would have asked when she called earlier, but his brain had still been sleep and pain muffled. Without the aid of mission adrenalin to clear his mind, he hadn’t thought to ask.

“Level five, room sixty-three. It’s the post-op ward.” She rattled off without a thought.

“Thank you.” Picking the coffees up from the reception desk he headed for the elevators.

As with most hospitals, it wasn’t as straightforward as going to the fifth floor and following the signs. He had to go to the fifth and cross half the building, go up another floor that he wouldn’t have been able to access from the first set of elevators, walk another hundred meters and descend  _ back _ to the floor he had just left. There he found Simmons waiting for him, in the same clothes from the night before with added dark circles under her eyes.

“How is he?” Phil demanded without any lead in. The level of concern he had for someone he didn’t know was concerning all on its own. He couldn’t afford to get emotionally invested in people, least of all some guy who didn’t seem capable of keeping himself out of life threatening trouble.

“Phillip?” His father’s voice rang out before Simmons could answer.

Conscious sight extended over her shoulder to see James in scrubs and a lab coat standing halfway down the corridor looking back at him. “What are you doing here?” James demanded.

“Checking on the man from last night.”

“He’s fine.” James said.

“Yes, Doctor Collidge was just doing his neuro-exam. He has a bad concussion so he will be staying in the hospital for a little while.” Simmons elaborated when James didn’t.

James frown at the release of medical information. With her back to him, the younger woman didn’t see him and continued talking.

“He is awake if you want to see him.” She waved down the hall, indicating the door James was standing in front of.

“Thank you.”

He followed her down the hall until she split off to talk to his dad, drawing him off so Phil could duck into the bare hospital room. With the white sheets against his skin, he looked even paler than he had laying the snow the night before. Dark bruises bloomed across his arms and face. Phil was sure there were more hidden by the too often washed fabric they had covering him.

Crystal blue eyes that he remembered from that summer were watching the door. Barely able to focus, eyes glazed with drugs and head trauma, he was still tense with something. Pain probably. But maybe fear?

= + =

Clint’s mind skittered across thoughts. Time moving slowly and then disappearing between one blink and the next. The dark, concrete room with the little old lady vanished, no more than smoke in the night. An oppressive darkness pressed down on him, and then wet, cold sprang into life underneath his abused body. He could barely feel it. Some parts of him were numb. Other’s burnt with bruised fever. His lungs clenched when he tried to draw in air, but his muscles refused to cough to try and clear whatever lodged in his throat.

Every millisecond played out in technicolour. The fight for oxygen and its accompanying life weaning the more time that slipped through him.

A scream.

Warmth.

Light.

Nothing.

The familiar glossy sensation of drugged sleep was wrapped around his brain. Blinking his gritty eyes open, the lowered fluorescent lights and smell of antiseptic told him he was in a hospital.

A Doctor who Clint didn’t recognise but looked familiar pushed aside the curtains that surrounded his bed. “Ah, Mr. Baker. I see you are awake. How are you feeling?” The bright blue of his eyes twitched something in his memory but under the hazy of drugs he couldn’t catch it.

“Mr. Baker?” The Doctor said when Clint stayed silent.

Oh, right. He was talking to him. But, Baker? That wasn’t an alias he had ever used, too close to his real name for comfort.

“Uh, yeah? Wha’?” Clint coughed, throat sore and dry. The well and truly broken nose also made it difficult to talk.

Wordlessly the doctor held a straw to Clint’s lips, only letting him wet his mouth before taking it away again.

“Can you tell me how you hurt your head?” The Doctor, Colidge? Clint couldn’t quite make out the name embroidered in overly fancy font on the man’s coat, asked.

Clint vividly remembered the boot, but didn’t think telling the guy he had been kick in Kyrgyzstan was the best idea when by accent he was in the US somewhere. East coast maybe?

“No.” he croaked instead.

Dr. Colidge’s frown deepened. “Please remember the number four, I’m going to ask you some questions and then ask you to tell me the number. Where are you?”

“In a hosbidal.” That at least was obvious, what hospital was still in question.

“Very good. And the date?”

Fuck, he had seemingly travelled half way around the world without remember, it could be an fucking year, let alone the date. “I don’no.” He mumbled.

“Well, you weren’t in the best condition when you came in. It’s Christmas day.” Colidge marked something down on the paperwork he was holding.

“Can you tell me the alphabet backwards?”

“Zed, Ex, Double U, Dee….” He trailed off. That wasn’t right. “Wai’, dhere’s a vee in dhere somewhere…”

The crinkle between the doctor’s eyebrows grew.

“What was the number I asked you to remember?”

His eyes were cool behind his glasses. The shiver that ran down Clint’s spine had nothing to do with the slight fever he was running according to the monitor next to his head.

“Um,” He didn’t remember any number. “‘wo?” He guessed. It wouldn’t be a big number would it? That would just be mean.

“Ok, thank you Mr. Baker.” The doctor left again.

Clint was just starting to drift off again, when the rattle of the metal curtain rings on the metal track pulled him back to fearful awareness. Eyes as focused as they would get on the opening slit in the pale salmon and blue tartan fabric.

Another man stepped through. Crisp dark grey, almost black, suit hugged his muscled form. Clint let his eyes travel up the man’s body. Meeting his eyes, he was pulled up short. They were the same eyes as the doctor, although warmed and in a face he knew. Agent Coulson. The doctor must have been Coulson’s father.

Too drugged to keep his reaction to himself, he felt his eyes widen in recognition and then narrow in fear and suspicion. Had SHIELD finally caught up with him?

“Mr, ah Baker.” Coulson glanced over his shoulder as he addressed him by the alias. So, he either knew who Clint was and was keep it from his dad, or did and was playing into whatever the hell this was. “Do you recognise me?”

“New Yorg. Agen’ Coulson.” Clint muttered.

For some reason the man flinched at his own name.


	16. Chapter 16

Hearing the tired, raw voice for the first time was surprising. Phil had half expected for the man to continue to refuse to say anything.

“Ah, yes. But not here. Phil Collidge.” He introduced himself. Re-introduced? They had never actually been introduced in the first place, but the man knew where he live, worked, and now both is main alias and his actual name. That was twice what everyone SHIELD, except Marcus and Jasper, knew about him.

“Clind Bardon.” The man, Clint said, his broken nose slightly mangling the words.

“Don Baker.” Phil corrected. Seeing the confusion in Clint’s eyes he continued. “There is a SHIELD doctor here, Jemma Simmons, the hospital believe you are friends and that your name is Don Baker. Finding you was too public and no-one here knows about my job. We had to create a way to keep an eye on you.” He explained. Some of the confusion cleared. “How did you know I was in Boston, let alone which Church my family goes to?” The note of accusation crept into his voice. Logically, he knew Clint had at least stalked him at some point, it was the only explanation for how he knew where Phil lived. But to track him to Boston? Phil hadn’t even been here in more than ten months.

“Bosdon? How’m I in Bosdon?” The confusion was back, stronger than before.

“You don’t know where y…” His question was cut off by the sound of the door opening behind him, and his father’s voice.

“…Told you, a grade three.” James stepped through the half open curtain, Simmons in his wake.

She smiled apologetically at Phil.

“Phillip, you should not be in here.” The every present scowl on James’ face got worse.

“Why’m I in Bosdon?” Clint muttered from the bed. “Did SHIELD didnap me? Coulson? Did’ya didnap me?” The question was louder the second time, along with the names that his father should never have heard.

Even having never heard of Coulson or SHIELD before, it wasn’t hard for James to make the connection that he was being left out of a very large loop. His eyes followed Clint’s to Phil.

“I thought you barely knew Mr Baker?” He demanded. Sneering Clint’s fake name, making it clear he didn’t believe a word they were saying to him.

“I told you I had met him before, once. He’s got me confused with someone else.” Phil sighed, pretending it happened all the time. He was forgettable, that was his super power, and part of being forgettable was people confusing him with someone else. His dad would believe that.

“Na-uh.” Clint pouted.”Baddery Parg. I bled on your carped.”

Every time Clint opened his mouth things got worse. Phil glared at him, trying to mentally tell the man to shut the fuck up.

“How does he know where you live Phil? If you’re sleeping with him, why not just say? We can’t be any more disappointed in you than we are.” His voice was almost flippant. Phil’s place in the family in no doubt to any of the lucid people in the room.

There wasn’t much to say to that. Clint was just as likely to say something to negate any excuse or lie he came up with, and it was clear that James’ mind was made up. As far as he was concerned, Phil was hiding a boyfriend.

The awkward tension didn’t leave with his father, who, smug with having the last word, strode out of the room.

“Fuck.” Phil sighed, rubbing a hand over his face in frustration. He could already imagine what they were all going to say when he got home.

“Wha’?” Clint asked, gaze flicking between Phil and Simmons.

“Nothing.” She assured. “Just the drugs talking.” She smoothed out the bedding under Clint’s left arm nervously as she talked. “You should try and get a touch more sleep. I’m sure you want to get all better as quick as you can.” She smiled down at him kindly.

As she babbled away, Phil shambled to the window, glaring down at the glistening layer of snow below him. He had only been awake a little more than an hour and it already felt like he had run a marathon.

He stood there for a long time, stewing in all of the shit that came with seeing his family. The sound of the other two people in the room talking a soft background noise that was comforting without being intrusive. He didn’t actively notice when the murmuring petered out, if asked, he would be able to pinpoint the second it happened and probably what thought he was thinking when it fell silent, but left to his own devices it wasn’t worth noticing.

Tapping in the long password that would allow him to remotely access a limited section of SHIELD’s database, he entered the name he had been given. ‘Clint Barton’, who are you?

The light scuff of shoes against the ubiquitous linoleum  _ was  _ worth noticing. The footsteps came to a stop directly next to him. Glanding down,  he saw Simmons standing there, looking down at the street below.

“He’s asleep.” She told him.

Phil hummed, he knew that, but the manners beat into him at a young age dictated that he acknowledge her in some way.

“Do we know who he is?”

The query had sent up a single result.

“Clint Barton. A mercenary who at one point worked for a person of interest.” He read out the short, two sentence file they had on the man. Why was a low level mercenary that hardly pinged SHIELD’s radar following a Senior Agent? And how? He had to have some serious skills to have stalked Phil, but if so, why didn’t they know who he was?

It was her turn to hum non-committedly. The sound caught his attention more than the measly database entry. Finally, he turned to look at her. Silently ordering her to vocalise the thought.

“Oh, no. He probably is a mercenary. But that’s not the most interesting thing about him.” She glanced up at Phil and then back outside. “His musculature is interesting. Over-developed. I’ve never seen that particular pattern, not in person anyway. There was an article I read, about the stress markers on skeletons in Hungary. It looked at musculature in archers. Very interesting bit of research. It’s not exactly the same. They found a larger build up on the master arm, that is apparent here, but the same muscle groups.”

“Archer?” He cut in between one breath and the next. Trying to get her back on topic.

“Right, yes. Archer. Or something else that uses  _ a lot  _ of upper body strength with a focus on the trapezius, deltoideus, biceps brachii, triceps brachi, supra..”

“Yes thank you.” He didn’t need a full work down of every muscle needed to pull back a bowstring. His mind was already tripping with possibilities. The only archer, or archer like person, who would be interested in him was Hawkeye. He had been hunting the man after all. If he was inclined to believe Chisholm, Hawkeye was dead, but as he wasn’t it was more likely that the other man was still running around somewhere, which meant to question was, was the man in the bed behind him the archer he was looking for?

A hazy, sun drenched memory supported the identification. A sand coloured rooftop opposite his own in Morocco, a golden figure standing tall, a city gone crazy between them. He hadn’t been close enough, or had the right equipment, to see much about the other person, but the body shape and size fit. Without the additional information it hadn’t twigged in his memory in New York.

He was 90% certain Clint Barton was Hawkeye. That wasn’t a theory he was going to be sharing with a level 2 Doctor though. Hawkeye had been classified at level 4 until his supposed death. Then he had been shuffled into the possible cold case, don’t archive just yet. He made a mental note to request the file, even though he knew every redacted word forward and backward.

They stood there in thoughtful silence as the heart monitor, and oxygen levels, and IV beeped, and pinged, and dripped behind them. The normal hospital sounds a stark contrast to the abnormal thoughts of modern day archers and dead coming back to life. Simmons drifted away first. Checking on her patient with quiet murmurs of reassurance to the unconscious man and soft ting of metal against metal as she updated the chart hanging beside his bed.

As the sun reached its zenith, he left the window. Returning to the bedside of the unconscious enigma. He settled into the chair, waiting for Clint to wake up and answer some of the questions bouncing around his skull. He looked younger in sleep. Even younger than only six months ago in Phil’s apartment, when fear and pain stalked his shadow and invaded his sleep.

The fear was gone, whatever had happened to him in the last six months had taken that weight off the younger man. The drugs flowing freely through his system was dealing with the pain.

Bright blue eyes blinked open without any warning. No up-tick in any of the monitoring to indicate a chance, no twitch or flicker. They were closed one second and open the next. They were clearer than they should have been with the amount of pharmaceuticals Simmons was pumping into him.

“We’re eben.” The newly awakened man mumbled.

It was an odd opening. Even how?  Even in what?

A little muddle from his own pain killers, having only just taken him mid-day dose three hours late, his response was out of his mouth before it ran past his brain.

“What?” Could have been worse.

“You sabed me, I sabed you. Eben.”

At least the first part of that made sense. In a sense, Phil had saved him, in New York and now again in Boston. But when had he saved Phil?

“I guess that would make us even.” Phil tried to keep his voice a gentle mix of understanding and consolation but felt like it fell more into the condescension column. He fell silent as he tried it figure out how to ask when the other man saved him without sounding disbelieving. He didn’t doubt that he had, or at least thought he had, but long experience told him that people’s definition of ‘saved’ had a very wide variety. All of which was ignoring that he didn’t need to be payed back for helping someone.

Clint started talking again before he could form the question. “Yeah. Cause I was gonna die, and then you were gonna die cause they wanted me to kill you, so I killed them instead.” His ramble was a little hard to understand under the mangled consonants from his broken nose, but Phil got the gist.

“Why did they want you to kill me?” There, that didn’t come out doubting or condescending, only curious.

“I dunno. Prob’ly god in the way of a plod som’dhing.” His words were starting to slur as his grip on reality faltered.

“Either way, thank you for saving me.” Phil tried it gentle him back to sleep.

“Hu, no. Waid.” Clint struggled to open his eyes. An unfairly attractive pout painting itself across his face. “You saved me.”

“Yes. And now we are even.” THe concept had seemed important to the injured man.

“Na-ah. You sabed me  _ again _ . “ He emphasised. “We’re nob eben.” The words were terribly close to a whine. “I know!” His face brightened. “You’re lonely. And sad. I’ll fix that and then we are even.”

Phil didn’t really want to ask how this man knew he was lonely. No one should have been able to see that. Neither did he want to ask how he was going to fix it. The words escaped him anyway. “How?”

Whatever answer he was expecting, it wasn’t the one he got. Clint surged up, muscles contracting and rippling with the move. His lips crashed into Phil’s hard, skin chapped from exposure and intubation during surgery. The position couldn’t have been comfortable, it certainly wasn’t for Phil, being kissed by a man he wasn’t 100% convinced he knew the actual name of. But a warm, broad hand had settled against the nape of his neck and he couldn’t pull away. Well, not without causing further injury.

The initial contact had been hard, momentum pushing them together painfully. But the other man quickly lessened the pressure. Turning the kiss into a soft exchange of affection instead of the aggressive move it initially seemed like. Phil couldn’t help himself, he melted into it just a little. A soft sigh parting his lips. Clint took advantage of the opening, licking slowly into Phil’s mouth. Increasing the pressure slightly but it was still in a carefully exploration. An invitation. One that Phil wasn’t sure he wanted to turn down. The younger man was attractive and he had been lonely. Finding someone who knew what he did, was interested in him, and that he was interested in back? It would probably be marked down in history as a minor miracle.

Clint was the first to break the contact. Pulling away with a gasp. He was out of breath, unable to breathe through his swollen nose.

“Wow.” He huffed out between gulping in air.

Settling back into his seat, when had he left it? Phil cleared his throat.

“Yes, well. Okay.” What did you say after having the best kiss of your life from a virtual stranger? “You should sleep.” God, what was wrong with him? IF the sharp blue eyes of the man in the bed weren’t still watching him, he probably would have given into the urge to slap his own forehead. Try and hit some smooth into himself. “One question before you do.”

He waited for the hum of ascent before continuing. “You are Hawkeye, aren’t you?”

Clint huffed a laugh. “Yeah, use’da be..” A yawn cut off his laugh. “Nob anymore dough. Hawgeye’s dead.” The very last was mumbled and half lost in a snore.

= + =

With Clint asleep, Phil was left with a bit of a quandary. Staying and watching the man sleep was a level of creepy that was unneeded in this situation. But returning home to the questions and snide remarks from his family was unappealing he was seriously considering going back to New York without Fury’s blessing. But that would leave Clint without a contact in the city, well Simmons was here, but eh would be much help if however had tried to kill him, either time, was to come after him again.

So, stay in the hospital but find something to do that didn’t include staring at the golden fan of Clint’s eyelashes against his tanned skin.

Coffee and a sandwich from the cafeteria he decided as his stomach clenched, reminding him he hadn’t eaten today and had already taken two doses of painkillers that really were meant to be taken with food.

He took his time over the scant meal available in the hospital cafeteria on Christmas Day, chatting to the single staff member manning the registers for a while and then wasted a bit more time reading a three day old newspaper and doing the crossword.

There was a noticeable increase in the amount of activity on Clint’s floor when Phil decided he had wasted enough time. People in scrubs and lab coats were bustling into and out of the room he had spent the morning in. A person he recognised was standing next to Dr Simmons, only slightly taller than the diminutive doctor, Jasper’s shaved head reflected the harsh fluorescent lights.

Simmons spotted him through the crowd first.

“Oh, sir. Jasper is here.” She pinked slightly at the informality of using a first name.

The smile on Jasper’s face suggested he didn’t mind.

“Phil.” Jasper strode across the remaining scuffed linoleum and shook his hand, a friend or colleague greeting another.

Phil had spotted his father hiding in the nurses station and appreciated the subterfuge. “Jasper. What’s going on?”

“We are removing Mr Barton to New York. Information suggests he should be in more, secure, surroundings than this.”

James finally approached, hearing the end of Jasper’s explanation. “Do you know these people Phillip?” He was frowning around at the bustle.

“Only Jasper. I do his taxes. Agent Sitwell, my father Doctor James Coolidge. Dad, Agent Jasper Sitwell, FBI.” That was the normal cover SHIELD used when dealing with civilians.

“Great to meet you.” Jasper shook James’ hand with a tighter grip and harder motion than was needed. He knew enough about how Phil had been treated by his family to have no respect for the older man. The smile on his face completely fake.

“Uh, yes. You to.” James withdrew his hand slowly, as if afraid he wouldn’t get it back.

“Excuse me.” Phil slipped away before his dad could try and talk to him. Sliding into the room between a nurse he recognised from SHIELD medical and a security officer he thought was normally stationed at the Fridge. Whatever was going on, it was serious.

Taking up a place in the corner of the room, he was out of the way as they swapped Clint’s lines from the hospital’s to their own portable units.

“Sir.” Agent Sitwell came to stand next to him. Proper greeting done out of sight of the civilians.

“What’s this new information?” It was his way of asking for a sit-rep without saying the words.

“Chisholm was positively chatty after you left.” Jasper obeyed the poorly hidden order. “IDed your boy as Ronin.”

“Chisholm might have started talking, but he is still lying. He is Hawkeye. Or was. I haven’t been able to get the specifics yet.” Phil waved away the accusation.

Clint couldn’t be Ronin.

The masked assassin had been running around on and off for decades. Killing indiscriminately as long as he was paid enough. They were on SHIELD’s, and a double handful of other agencies, most wanted list. The one that invited a bullet to the brain, not the one that allowed for a recruitment attempt. They weren’t the man Phil was just starting to get a glimpse into.

“Gothenburg also finally finished their analysis. They also brought up Ronin. Apparently he has been a busy little assassin.” The expression of Jasper’s face was a mix of impressed and disgusted.

“Then you should find them instead of accusing innocent people.” The words had a good deal of bite behind them.

“Phil.”

The sound of his own name was grating. The unneeded informality only accentuating the unsaid ‘you are being dense’. With a carefully controlled inhale, he let the word wash over him.

“Wha’s goin’ on?” A tired voice slurred.

“Mr Barton. My name is Agent Sitwell. Under the auspice of the Strategic Homeland Intervention and Enforcement and Logistics Division I am placing you under arrest for international crimes including but not limited to fifteen counts of murder. You do not have the right to an attorney or a trial by your peers.” Sitwell rattled off the requisite speech for throwing someone down a deep dark hole.

“Whad? No. Whad? Phil?” There was a deep sadness and betrayal under the drugs turning Clint’s eyes hazy.

 “He’s redeemable.” Phil insisted. Trying to get between the agents and Clint. Facing down Sitwell and a phalanx of well-armed agents was not a situation he had ever envisioned happening. The lack of the security of the weight of his own holster and weapon exasperated the desperation clawing at his throat.

“Li’e a coupon!” Clint snarked through his broken nose. “Wha’?” he asked at the look Phil shot him.

“Stop helping.”

“Mr Barton. Are you Ronin?” Sitwell’s voice was hard. He didn’t leave any room for Phil to interrupt again.

The transformation was instantaneous. The energy that Clint exuded shrunk, making him appear smaller and more injured. Almost fragile. He avoided Sitwell’s demanding gaze, watching Phil instead. “Sorry.” He whispered. The word a stab low in Phil’s gut.  He stepped out from between the bed and the agents. Letting them click handcuffs on the injured assassin.

He left the room without looking back. Clint plaintively calling out for him only once. A whirlwind of apology and regret in his voice. Phil locked it out. Stalking through the cold, institutional hallways. It was only once he was standing in the grey slash of last night’s snow that he felt like he could get any air. Gulping oxygen desperately, he was on the verge of hyperventilating.

He staggered into one of the waiting cabs gasped out his father’s address and stuck his head between his knees, feeling the panic roll over him in waves.

= + =

The house was deathly silent when he walked through the door. The door into his father’s study was open and a golden light spilled from inside. It was an oddity, James never left that open, but he didn’t have the brain space to consider it. The drive back to the house had been just long enough to quell the panic that had been clawing at his throat, not enough to dispel it completely.

“Phillip.” James was suddenly standing in the doorframe.

No getting around talking to him. Phil thought with a sigh. “Father.”

“I take it you aren’t actually an accountant.” The words were flat. No indication as to the older man’s feelings on the matter.

“I am an accountant.” He stuck to his cover but could see it was quickly fraying around the edges. Better to try and get out in front of it. “Just not for who you think.” He could see it was enough. James’ expectations for his oldest son hadn’t been high in a long time and he could easily believe that Phil was a mid-level suit for some unnamed government agency. The intrigue of  _ which _ wasn’t going to catch or hold his interest. He had no patience to differentiate between working for the Department of Education from working for the NSA. To him, it was all government work and below them.

With a sharp nod, he vanished back into his office. Door firmly closed behind him.

= + =

Phil drifted through the next few days, silently advancing from one room in the family home to the next. Moving from a place if the air became too oppressive or someone else entered it. By the end of the 26 th , the rest of the family were actively avoiding him also.

In his long career he had never misjudged a situation so badly. Never trusted someone so unworthy of it. He rooted for the underdog, helping them and supporting them when he could, but he never trusted them. Not for months or even years.

By lunch time of the 29 th , he had had enough. Floating through life wasn’t acceptable. Spurred to movement, he had his bag packed and a flight for that evening back to New York booked. At almost midnight in the middle of the Christmas holidays most workplaces would be deserted. Maybe a security guard or two and that one person who didn’t seem to have a life outside of work. SHIELD was not your normal workplace, even the DoD slowed down for the holidays. They didn’t, or not so’s anyone else would notice. Undercover agents couldn’t just be extracted or left out to dry because you wanted to be home with your family. Criminal networks didn’t have annual holidays.

Even with his decision made, he still found himself delaying. Walking just slightly slower than normal, stopping to check in on a few projects he had handed off over a month ago that weren’t his responsibility anymore. Brewing a fresh pot of coffee for the kitchen on the analysts’ floor when he stopped for a cup and saw it was nearly out. He couldn’t put it off forever though.

Ambling into the Director’s office, stack of correctly filled out paperwork in one hand and coffee for them both in the other.

“No.” Fury said, without looking up from his own paperwork.

Phil ignored him. Placing his load of files down squarely in front of his boss, took his seat and waited hands folded precisely in his lap.

The scratch of Fury’s pen the only sound in the room. As he turned a page, his eyes flicked up and saw the alphanumeric serial number at the top of the forms. “No.” He growled again, an added glare this time, before going back to scratching away.

“It’s a good thing I didn’t get you that pen set for Christmas, you’re abominable with your stationary.” Phil remarked.

“I much prefer the international assassin you got me instead.” Fury’s smile showed too many teeth to be considered friendly.

Phil sniffed at him. “I did no such thing. That whole cluster fuck is on Sitwell’s head.” He disavowed the arrest. Yes, Ronin needed to be in custody, but experience was telling him more was going on than they were seeing. Fuck. That wasn’t the feeling he wanted to have. Everything was getting mixed up in his head and he couldn’t be objective anymore. Hence, the forms Fury was steadfastly ignoring.

“That whole cluster fuck, was the detention of one of SHIELD’s Top Ten most wanted. Pretty much, second only to the Black Widow.” Fury grumbled, finally turning his full attention from the AAR to the Agent across the desk from him. Coulson wasn’t the sort to take credit when it wasn’t due, but he always appreciated a good strategic move. Why not this time? “What’s going on Cheese?” He threw down his pen and lent back, folding his hands across his stomach. This isn’t your boss asking, it’s your old friend, it projected.

Phil slumped in response, rubbing hand across his face and squeezed his eyes shut. “I need the space Marcus. I’m struggling to stay objective.”

Fury looked down at the STP-09-C: Request for Internal Transfer by Senior Agent, including Designation Re-Assignment. “Where to?”

He hated that the logical posting put him in the position his family was constantly criticising him for, but he had the credentials. He may as well use them. “Accounting.”

Fury glared at him for a moment longer and then pulled the forms towards himself with a sigh. Speed reading the particulars, he scribbled his signature across the forms. “Get it filed. The change will be active from the 1 st .” Fury passed the packet back across to him.

“Sir.” Phil collected them, and himself, before striding from the room. One more stop at HR and he was done. A new career with spreadsheets and budgets to look forward to…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282377286_Investigation_of_Hungarian_Conquest_Period_10th_c_AD_archery_on_the_basis_of_activity-induced_stress_markers_on_the_skeleton_-_preliminary_results


End file.
